


Au Wherein Dean Goes to Space

by smallbee



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel True Forms (Supernatural), Blood and Gore, Castiel's True Form (Supernatural), Cunnilingus, Demon Dean Winchester, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, F/M, M/M, Tender Sex, Torture, Violence against women, but I shan’t have someone have a preventable Bad Time, dean has sex with a woman and she’s a figment of his imagination, i promise it’s not as rude as it sounds, i’m not gonna lead you on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-09-28 03:21:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20419055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smallbee/pseuds/smallbee
Summary: Alternative to the finale of season 10. Dean is airlifted to a distant planet where he can never hurt anyone, because he is two hundred thirty-eight centillion miles from any living thing.





	1. Chapter 1, Touch Me Tease Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There be M/F porn ahead.
> 
> Also, now there’s a Spotify playlist by the title of Congratulations, You Are A Pioneer! Find it here:
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/user/22i5ztu6kvixjxpkoubvos2ka/playlist/5RxgQ5ygZfTQ5EHUpqFvvr?si=ktOAZqWxS1yrZs2bZuQ1CQ

"Congratulations, you are a pioneer."

Dean stepped away from Death to examine the ground beneath his feet. A shade of deep, maroonish voilet rock.

"You have reached the furthest distance any human has ever achieved in the exploration of space, and they never will. It is mostly habitable. You," Death grinned wryly. "Will have no trouble exploring at all."

"Is it night?" Dean asked, gazing at the moon in the cloudless sky.

Death had left.

Dean decided to stop standing and the journey to the ground was through pleasantly warm air. Like a butcher’s carving knife through warm butter. "Fuck." He stared dumbly ahead at the barren, rocky surface. Textured. This was no plains, that was for sure. Some pretty high rock ridges, good exploration terrain, but daunting. He stood up and turned to look behind him.

"Fuck." Was he at the bottom of some foreign planet's Grand Canyon? Miles behind him stretched into the sky a craggy wall. Well, the wall was only on one side of him. Ahead wasn't exactly flat, but he didn't feel trapped in a dust bowl.

"Fuck!" Dean sat down again, he was sweaty, so sweaty. He had expected two settings from a planet, either moon-like or lush grass, but he supposed that would entail living creatures for him to kill. Moon-like his was. He was lightheaded.

Was there something to drink on a lifeless planet?

Why couldn't he just die?

The dizziness was getting bad. _Maybe if I puke I can eat it again,_ crossed his mind, and then Dean felt himself gag at the thought. _Hold it together. Think of the smell of a breezy, summer day._

_Oh, sh—_

He convulsed and emptied his stomach.

"I'm not eating that." Dean spoke out loud, revealing his gross, quiet thought to nobody.

_If Cas knew where I was he'd have me home in two seconds._

_Stop that! Stop..._ Dean didn't want to send out an accidental prayer, because Cas would come, and ruin everything. Except he hadn't teleported in a while, his wings had been offline.

Cas would eventually scrape up some juice. Then Dean was in danger of being discovered. Rue the day, he grinned to himself, because for a long time, at least a year, Dean had been praying for Cas to get his grace powered back up. He wasn't sure who he was directing it to, and he suspected that Cas himself received a lot of Dean's wishing, but man, Cas needed this.

_”What if I told you I could relocate you somewhere far away," Death had offered, "Not even on this earth, where you would still be alive, but no longer a danger to yourself or others?" _

_He knew his words had reached Dean. There was a silent switch that had flipped on and Death had reveled in the moment. Everything would be as it should._

_Dean watched where he stood, arms at his side in perfect defeat. Death lowered his finger, aware he needed no such accusatory gesture to pin Dean Winchester to his place. Winchester had nothing left but to listen in rapt attention._

_"He's going to find me. And Sam— I can't help it. I'll listen to him. He's the only one who can talk me out of this."_

_Like the child tires themselves crying into sleep, Dean needed quiet to settle around him to think clearly again. And so defeat was what was needed._

_"You know what's right. So_ don't_ disappoint me."_

This is it, _Dean thought._ This is the solution to everything.

_He darted his eyes from the being known as Death incarnate to ingest the details of his surroundings._

_The restaurant was with him and in front of him and it was so far away. He walked over to the bar just to feel it; to hold the edge of the counter, thumb on the resin surface disappearing the dust settled under its wake, fingers brushing unvarnished wood beneath. He stopped cupping the bar edge and watched the festive lights, the skeleton mural._

_What would Sam do?_ Kill _Death? Sam usually digs his heels in for what he sees as reason, but he isn't Death. He isn't truth. He'd been a little unhinged, lately, even, and that was laughable considering Dean's been living with the fucking mark on his arm, but Dean becoming a demon in May had only made his brother more desperate. His instability brought Sam down too, and they were both going to choke on the blood of anyone and everyone around them if he didn't fucking think of something._

_If Death had a Sam solution he sure as fuck wasn't offering. What would Sam do to get Dean back this time? He wasn't gonna fucking erase himself from existing memory for Sam. Knowing that smart fucker, Sam would somehow figure out there's a Dean-shaped hole missing from his life anyway._

_"Shit," Dean said gruffly. He wiped at his eye. "Okay. Okay. Here's what I'm gonna do. You and me, we're going to lie."_

_Death listened. "About what?"_

_"You're going to tell them that I'm going somewhere, but you're not gonna say it's another planet. There are so many planes out there, Heaven, Hell—"_

_"Another planet," Death interjected, not wanting Dean to draw away from the purpose. Death was giving a kindness to every evil beast in Purgatory, unbeknownst to them._

_"Yeah, and supposedly pocket dimensions where monsters drag their victims. Lots of places. Where do you live? Always in the veil, huh?" Dean stepped forward, palms out. "Well, I ain't about to get ghost-y, Sam 'n Cas'll never accept that, so you got anything else?" _

_Death dipped his chin down. "You want to tell your brother and your angel that I've brought you to my library?" He scoffed._

_"What?" _

_"I am against my better judgement fond of you, but being a destructive force with a curse imbued I hardly think it's wise to set you loose with my archives. Unless you mean my coffin six hundred feet below the Earth's crust? Really, if you insist, but you will find it rather claustrophobic." Dean reeled at the new knowledge._

_"It's just pretend. All a lie so they don't. Know," he persisted._

_"And yet." Death picked up a taquito. "You are quite a good cook. Shame to have your talents wasted on an unnamed planet."_

_"Look, if you think it's a good idea, I'll go to your library." Dean stepped forward again. "But Sam has to think that I'm good. Safe." He stopped walking at the serving tray. "And happy." It was unnerving, the echo of safe and happy waltzing in his skull. He wanted those words to come true badly. But he steadied himself to ignore the fear. _

_The crunch from the taquito was the only response Dean received. Finally, Death wiped his lip._

_"Okay, I'll lie. You'll go off to your planet, and Sam and trotting Castiel will believe you're my secretary."_

_Dean felt a rush of disappointment at his final sentence. Desperate times. He nodded. _

How was he going to do this? Dean needed a distraction. And then, when he was ready, he could send regular updates to Cas via prayer about how he was living it up in Death's library himself.

_Whatever you do, don't die. If you die, you come back with black eyes._

As if that even mattered on a planet with a moon but no tides.

An unwelcome surprise was that Dean felt no lighter and if anything, gravity was working against him. In a year he might be an inch shorter, but there didn't appear to be any trees or graphite to mark with. Knowing height would become a luxury of the past.

Dean hummed as he hiked up and down the world around him.

_Yeah, in a two days I'm calling Death and begging him to let me into his library._

Death wasn't answering.

Dean needed to kill something. If he'd had supplies he would have summoned Crowley and killed him himself already, and Dean had a soft spot for Crowley.

This desolate planet, which was always set in night time apparently, and which he'd decided to name, but hadn't. There was no name that felt accurate for a featureless planet that Dean had all to himself.

"I-en-ee-ee-dee—" Dean worked out, trying to find the name. "Tee-oh-kay-eye-el-el."

That sounded like something. "Tyokaiel. Tokyo angel. This don't look like Tokyo to me..."

It was easy to direct prayers to Tokyo angel instead of 

"Dear Tokyo-iel who art not real,” Dean prayed. “I need to kill."

Then after a length of time Tokyo angel started to be less a transcendental being and needed an image, but Castiel kept popping up in his mind as his go-to prayer recipient.

"Dear Tokyo-iel. You are a Japanese woman with long black hair..." Something violent was bubbling. "You wear.. shit, you're wearing... a red dress. Because I— I—" Dean picked up a rock and threw it as hard as he could. "No! Not red. You are wearing a green dress. Like grass." Dean found more rocks to throw. "Not a dress at all. No, you're cool... you can hang with the guys. You're wearing a lacy pink sports bra.

"And it's got... flower nipple pads." Dean threw another rock, and to his relief the bloodlust was being replaced with something else. "You've got candy nipple pasties too. Mm... tassels.. and also strawberry flavored stickers... they're flat, except when they're on your nipples they get..."

Oh, he wanted to masterbate now. But here? 

Dean leaned back against a rock and undid his belt. His pants were constantly clinging to his legs, with the sweat. He could use the sweat to promote this fantasy.

"Mm," he moaned experimentally, to turn himself on. "Mmuh," he breathed out, quieter this time, and imagined Tokyo angel doing the same.

She was in a bed on top of dark sheets, wearing her strawberry stickers and black panties. She stood up on her knees to readjust her sitting position, and Dean could see the cloth outline of the lips of her coochie sticking out with the backdrop of the headboard. She settled for sitting on her pillow, back resting comfortably against the headboard, legs stretching to meet him where he was at the end of the bed. His mouth started to salivate.

"Are you wet?" Dean asked.

Tokyo angel didn't respond, but she parted her knees and smiled.

Dean lowered himself onto his belly on the bed and crawled toward her inviting pussy. He stuck his nose into the black cotton and took a deep breath, and ran his tongue up the lump, trying to part her lips through the fabric. She let out a sigh and rested her fingers in his hair. 

Dean sat upright and Tokyo angel lifted her hips to allow him to pull her underwear down. The inside was lined in a spot of creamy white. Dean slid her panties over her legs and noticed a scrape on her knee.

"You know how I got that," Tokyo-iel said, matter-of-factly.

"You're one of the guys," Dean grinned, and slid the underwear past her feet. She had really cute feet, and a funny callous that he rubbed his thumb over. She jerked her leg, curling her knees up to her chest.

"That tickles!"

Dean laughed, and lifted her panties to his nose. "You smell amazing, sweetheart."

Facing her head on, he framed her face with two hands, and moved his hands up, carding his fingers through her hair, gently scratching the back of her head and then simply playing with the locks that hung dark and straight. He was careful to avoid looking directly into her face, because he wasn't ready yet, and watched her hair instead. Dean ran his hands down her throat, shoulders, and arms, lightly holding her hands by the end. Her palms were heavy, and she grounded him. 

He pressed himself flush to her in a warm embrace, feeling her breasts push against his torso pleasantly. She wrapped her arms around him in return, a hand rising to the back of his neck and scratching the base of his hair there. Her nails were rounded and maintained close cut, leaving her ministrations a little nicer than a scratch. 

"I—" Dean started.

"Shhhhhh," Tokyo-iel comforted. "I'm just returning the favor." Something new was blossoming in Dean's chest, new waves and crests of adoration. Holding each other was gratifyingly fulfilling.

He rubbed her back soothingly, enjoying the silken warmth. He felt light and heady and free to show her with his body that she was catching an electric current within him, a white hot spitting spark that ignited his chest cavity to a thumping, roaring drum. In that moment, Dean sudden felt he found a passion for her with everything he had, and he could give her everything. They hugged, melded their bodies together as if his heartbeat could enter her ribcage and she would finally feel what he felt.

Others had previously called him a sappy romantic in bed.

He found himself brushing his hands down to her soft love handles above her hips. "I'm drunk on you," Dean whispered into the shell of his angel's ear, desiring to press pursed lips to the skin behind it. The back clap of a small diamond earring caught his face, not uncomfortably. At her waist he gently dug his fingers in. 

The angel breathed out, slowly, trying to steady her exhale. "Oh, Dean," she said, voice strong but thick in yearning. She sounded like she was going to say something, when Dean raised his head from next to hers and finally braved looking at her face to listen. She zeroed in her gaze some place on his face. Dean's own gaze must have looked nearly cross-eyed, gazing down the bridge of his nose at her, his head was so close. She broke out into a grin. "Your nose is cuter from your left side." She lifted a hand to his bristles and maneuvered his face to one side to illustrate that which he couldn't see.

"I know," Dean huffed. "I've looked in a mirror. Do you think my nose is sexy? Does it turn you on?" He grabbed her shoulders and playfully tipped her over speedily with her lower half planted on the pillow like a fulcrum like that. She didn't even have time to make a surprised noise during the short journey to the sheets.

"Oooh-ho-ho," she grinned, stretching her arms above her head languidly, not unlike a cat that has found itself fallen off a couch. "You jest, but I've never seen a more alluring nose. This nose isn't two dimensional. This nose has personality, flair, it's got a lot packed into it's little nostril life... a surprise package deal. One side, adorable, the inside... snotty."

"You're snotty," Dean groused, lying down facing her like they were a pair of chopsticks. She pressed her pelvis insistently to the hardness in his underwear. "Oh, that... there's a thought."

He obliged and pressed it rhythmically into her pubes, shifting his hips into her soft form and pulling away leisurely, again and again. They adjusted so that Dean was on top.

He then used his bedded hand under her lower back to help her push into dick.

Dean departed from skin to skin to squirt a generous amount of lube onto his fingertips. It dripped into the crux of his fingers. Tokyo lay in her bed and put her hand on his bulge, feeling it.

"Do you like that?" she asked.

"Yeah," Dean said.

He turned his attention to her nipples, which had bubbled the strawberry flavored tape up to the point the edges were coming off. "Hold on, gotta re-stick those." He crouched over her form, flattening his tongue against the pasty and lathed it, and lowered his hand below himself to find her leaking cunt. 

"Ahhh," the woman said, swallowing, when she felt the foreign sensation of his finger barely inserted, not really attempting anything. 

"You feeling alright? Is this good or should I slow down a little?"

"Keep going."

Dean moseyed the tip of his finger around in her wetness, then pulled it out and wiped his entire finger across the entrance, coating his finger in more fluid. Tokyo angel breathed above Dean's head and occupied her hands squeezing his muscles.

Dean took a scoopful of her breast in his mouth, carrying her breast up so it lay on her chest higher than the other one, and kept it there with his mouthing. He loved the nature of breasts; the fatty tissue that could be repositioned and then fall back, heavy. He loved to cup them in his palm and lift, to feel the weight. He loved these breasts, addictive joy soared through his head as if he was drinking it straight from her nipple, and hedonistically he thought joy must taste like strawberry milk.

He delicately rubbed his lubed finger in slow circles around her little pearl nub, applying honey to the butterfly's wing, wishing he could watch her face for her reaction but refraining. He sped up his feather light touch to her clitoris, sweeping slippery tight circles quickly around it. Dean started to add pressure to the clit hood and rapidly tap it, breathing lustily into her armpit. 

"Like?" he asked the remains of deodorant he found there.

"Yes, I like that..."

"Dean glanced up and Tokyo-iel met his gaze. His irises were lust-blown; she thumbed his trim eyebrow.

Tokyo-iel grinned. "Oh, yeah. Absolutely."

Dean vibrated his finger in and out quickly, expertly, the sound becoming erotic and wet. He'd been training his fingers to their current speed and accuracy for years. Someone once told him he was like a human vibrator. It was a lot of practice, was all, but Dean had never been with a woman who'd met a man with this much practice. Secretly he thought he could win a contest, if anyone was testing, which nobody ever would— he'd learned as a teen women didn't receive much from a finger in the vagina— this served a different purpose. Tokyo-iel lifted her leg, trying to feel more sensation, and his finger was massaging brand new spots.

The appendage finally tired out it's drilling position, so, wiping his spent hand filthily on the contrasting dark sheets, he said, "Spread your legs wider." Tokyo-iel obeyed and he pressed the meat of his palm down in her pubic hair, pressing back and forth insistently. The woman shifted her hips up and down to get more pressure. Natural lubricant found itself on his fingers from her leaking pussy.

"We're getting you really wet down here," Dean purred. He moved to lick his palm and wet his dick inside his boxers, releasing the pressure by whipping his hand up and down his dick for longer than he intended, but damn it felt sensational, before laying on his stomach again, lowering his face to her entrance once more. "I want to stay in here forever..." He pressed his boxered dick over the bed, rutting it.

"Dean, you are a softie," the angel said. "And I don't just mean your handsome belly. You make me feel like I'm in control."

"You can take control, if you want," Dean replied. "I like... I enjoy being roughed up."

"Oh, Dean, I want you. Do you want to stay forever? You can stay as long as you want with me... I can show you my sexy rules." Dean's ears grew hot. He loved to be handled in bed. "We can do anything," she continued. "I'd love to be filled by you. No condom. I won't get pregnant... unless you want me to."

It hadn't previously been one of Dean's known kinks, but in the time he had he would need to develop new ones.

Dean sucked at her pussy, wetness getting on his face, her juices were making a wet spot on the sheets. "Mmmn," he groaned. "Forever..."

The smell of sweat and arousal clouded him and spurred him on. He ran his hand up and down from the inside of her knee to her thigh as he tugged a lip into his mouth and groaned, his fingers roaming.

He remembered to relax his jaw, relishing in the sensation of pattern so that he fell into sucking and licking her clit easily, never having to stop for as long as he had a rhythm. Her cherry became too sensitive, and she cried out.

Dean stopped. He blew a stream of air into her crotch.*

"Break time, sweetheart?" Dean sat up and wiped his face off with his hand. 

"I want you in me," Tokyo angel demanded. She was sweating profusely, the sheets soaking up what sweaty skin it came into contact with, and her face was tinged pink.

Dean was reluctant to forego a condom, even in his masturbatory fantasy. Condoms had always been part of sex, and sex without one didn't feel like sex.

"Nope. No, you do not need a condom," Dean told himself, and sprung himself free.

Tokyo-iel crooned at his body. He wasn't Clint Walker, but nobody had ever kicked him out of bed.

"Good boy, you took those boxers off," Tokyo angel started. "You got a collar? I want you to be mine."

Dean handed her a red leather collar.

"It should have a tag," the angel chided. "And those round studs. What do you say?"

The answer was probably 'yes', but Dean managed to whisper, "Please."

She wrapped the new collar around his neck, and the collar said Dean from it's shiny round tag. He felt the cool metal adjust to his heated skin at his throat and shivered in anticipation.

The angel slapped his face, too lightly, but she didn't seem to know or to have the heart to hit harder. She slapped his other cheek. "I'm in charge now." But she cupped his face in her hands and held him for a moment, simply staring into his lust-blown eyes.

He sighed, "You're amazing."

His leaking, twitching dick caught her attention, or maybe the intoxicating smell had become unbearable to ignore.

She swallowed, aroused, pupils blown wide and black, and positioned herself in his lap, looping her arms over his shoulders. She pushed herself onto his dick. "Off to the races, cowboy, and don't you dare stop unless I say so."

He shifted his hips in and out, thighs burning, lips moving with her salty ones making it difficult to breathe. The air was so, so hot. She cried out _Uh_ into their shared air at each new thrust, and kissing stopped altogether. She bounced with a new fervor. Her walls were gripping, warm and welcoming, the sensation of his dick sliding home so far incredible...

Dean mourned that he had only saliva to whip over his dick on this planet, but he was producing enough of it.

"Against the wall," Tokyo angel said. "Hold my legs up, I can't do it... nail me."

He rutted into her, and he could swear his dick was piercing her womb like this.

Sweat beaded at her upper lip and a watery trail poured from her hairline. She was getting so worked up, crying out, sensation and pleasure, and with an unsteady hand he tried to reaffirm his grasp her leg, but it was sliding dangerously against her skin and he pivoted, shoving into her on the bed. She was being pushed further back up the bed by his hips, literally traveling over the sheets by a good half foot, even the mattress in its bed frame was making noise but Dean was off to the races, endorphins high enough to push over the impala, and his thighs were burning.

Dean said, desperate, in a volume possibly too loud into the room, "Please, please, can I please c—"

With a loud cry, the angel rushed into an orgasm around his dick. Dean had laced his fingers in hers. He let go of her.

Dean leaned over and kissed her fully. "Okay. Alright. I want to have a different kind of fun, honey, so we'll give you..." 

Dean held up vibrating panties. "You can control whatever settings you want, and if your cherry's too sensitive you can back off. Alright. And I'll have a little fun of my own, see?"

Dean pulled out a jelly vibrator. He lubed it and gently inserted it, turning it to the first setting. The toy worked its magic, massaging Dean's ass. Dean beat his dick, facing a floor length mirror, seeing for himself a vulnerable, meaty man with his red collar and a fuck toy trying to feed itself through his pipes. His stomach flipped. Hot or not? He felt ashamed that Tokyo angel had to watch this display. She'd already orgasmed, he probably looked pathetic.

Dean couldn't help but think of men when he thought of things in his ass.

The cowboy sauntered up to the two of them, the angel and the hunter, eyes trained on Tokyo-iel's blissed out form at the headboard. He placed his hat on the bed and reached with his hand for Dean's angel's wetness.

"I'm right here," Dean said with his throat catching, squirming on the toy.

The cowboy's fingers left Tokyo-iel's box and he gave Dean a once over. "Yes, you are," the cowboy drawled. Dean was greeted with the cowboy reaching his come dipped fingers toward Dean's mouth. The hunter opened wide and the cowboy inserted his fingers.

Sexy rules. 

But Dean wasn't about to let go of his machismo for the cowboy. He needed to impress this cool, mysterious stranger.

He pulled his mouth away from the thick fingers and took out the vibrator, standing at full height, crossing his arms over his chest, making sure the man could see every inch of muscle he's packing in his arms. Dean eyed him with derision, pulling his bottom lip between is teeth in a display of disappointment. He thought he was taller than the cowboy, if the man were without his hat, and it made his point.

"Bet you I can make your day, tough guy," is what Dean said. "You can drink me under the table." And then he threw a wink.

The cowboy considered the man before him, and nodded. "I'll bet I can." He picked his hat up from the bed. And then he placed it on Dean's head. "On the carpet." Dean glowered at the man before raising his chin in agreement, and took ample time settling on the floor, allowing the stranger to do the same.

The hat-less cowboy bent like he was praying and enveloped his mouth around Dean's dick. He bobbed up and down, sucking and savoring, pawing at Dean's thick thighs, maybe because he liked their girth. Dean came hard into the suckling stranger's mouth.

"Cas, I missed this," Dean confessed, aware starkly of who the fantasy man is all of a sudden. He hadn't bedded Castiel on Earth since... before Cain happened to him.

_I'm sorry life got in the way._

Cas pulled the hat down over Dean's forehead, shielding Dean's eyes from the world. "I would have gone with you, if you'd asked me," he said, and they're sitting against the bedroom wall side by side, shoulders and legs brushing.

Dean removed the hat to look into Castiel's tired eyes. "You would have tried to talk me out of it."

"I would try. But it wouldn't work." Castiel tilted his head back into a crag in the rock, staring up at the strange planet's moon. "But I would give anything to be up here right now, so you wouldn't be alone."

Dean's throat tightened. "I would kill you. Immediately."

Castiel's gaze never left the moon, which looked so much like Earth's moon, but smaller. It was beginning to wane. "I'd leave the angel blade on Earth."

Dean coughed. "Ya think they got any water here? Not they. It's my planet. You think I got any water far away?

"I'm thirsty as hell. Staying alive doesn't mean I don't get thirsty. Or hungry. I'm downright ravenous.

"Now that I think of it, I guess Death really had it in for me. I'm gonna live half dead for the rest of my life."

Cas was crying, although usually it was hard to tell. He never really moved his face or made sad sounds when he was that distressed, and Dean could only ever distinguish his tearful from his passive face by the slight glimmer in his eyes, which never released their tears. Dean could barely see him beside him cloaked in this bizarre forever-nighttime, but he did notice a glimmer.

"Is Sam on the rampage? Has he killed Death yet? That why he's not answering my damn calls to get me off this planet?"

"You know I can't tell you that," Cas said sadly. "I'm not really here."

"Ah," Dean said, somewhere in the area of regaining consciousness. "He better not have. Consider it my dying wish."

He and his best friend watched the glowing rock in the sky from the maroon rock in the sky, probably three centillion galaxies from the blue rock in the sky, until Dean let him go and opened his eyes.

He'd fallen asleep with his hand shoved in his pants. The atmosphere looked a little lighter. So maybe there was hope for daylight on planet Purple Rock after all.

"Dear Tokyo-iel. You're gonna join me on a little water hunting expedition, so get on some rain boots and bring a dowsing rod, we're going water witch."

Bloodlust came over Dean differently on this planet. It was because there was nothing to focus on. Humming passed the time, but it didn't do its job.

It came over Dean as quickly and powerfully as an insidious sleepiness.

This would explain why Dean's encounter with a water-like substance immediately alerted him that life might have teemed on the planet when Death wasn't looking, and his bloodlust nearly burst a vein in his temple.

"Do I feel worse or better if it's an alien?" Dean muttered, white-knuckling a pile of small rocks in two fists.

He dropped them and cupped the liquid in his palms, dunked his whole face in after them, and drank, damn the consequences.

If Cas were here, Dean had no doubt that he'd try to kill him. He couldn't imagine a better way of passing eternity than with another eternal angel. Someone tangible.

Dean was a fuckin' idiot. He let Death take him to church without his Sunday best. He was atoning without a shaving kit.

Since he found the puddle of water, and it did seem to be water, Dean stayed in the area, circling his discovery, afraid that if his mind slipped for a second he would never be able to locate it again. If he had a shovel, he could dig deeper to see if there was more underground. If he had a fuckin' pike and one hundred meters of string he could always find his way back.

Begrudgingly, the planet was a lot better than Purgatory and Hell, but it was a trade off for a different kind of agony. Why were there never any spin-offs of Heaven? Places where people were alone and pleasantly content all the damn time.

Earth was one in a million. There were salads and burgers and showers and toothpaste and hair combs and the great outdoors, and there was drinking water and Game of Thrones and a cashier in every business, making human contact invariable and with the ability to make every interaction an okay one.

There were trees, which were sticks, and ash for writing things, and what Dean would give for a tree. He'd give up the hair on his body, for one, because soon he was going to look like Cousin Itt. The climate was too damn hot for that kind of nonsense.

Dean spent what had to constitute as way too many hours piling rocks, and the tower didn't reach that high. Part of him wanted to run headfirst into the pile and destroy it, trip on the scattered rocks, scrape and cut himself open and hurt, but it wouldn't be nearly enough blood to satisfy. Probably he'd lose and eye and knock himself unconscious right next to his rocks and his water.

The practice of gathering proved a useful distraction. The atmosphere was lightening exponentially, although no sun could be seen, and it almost looked like the planet was heading into a shade of dusk, which signaled there was a dawn.

His diligence became a more useful way of marking the planet surface— by taking away its markings. In a radius around his water source, the land began to clear of rocks, distinguishing its center blocked from Dean's view when he was behind a particular rock formation. All he had to do was look down. Here on one side of an invisible line were a bunch of loose rocks that needed to be put in the pile, and there on the other side were no rocks, so the no rock area had already been combed and led to his water and his pile of rocks.

It was rhythmic work, and so it never had to end.

Dean traveled wide spirals around his installation, climbing over and down rock formations to continue with his perfect record of the curvature, until he walked out from behind a particularly shapely boulder.

He was coming up to the impossibly tall foot of the Grand Canyon wall, and he knew he had been. But standing in this particular spot, Dean could see for the first time an entrance that was spacey enough for a walk through.

Wasn't the Grand Canyon carved out by water?

There was no question about it, Dean was going in.

He couldn't see anything.

If his eyesight had been adamant it wasn't night vision before, it might have quit on him now. Dean wanted to directly shield his eyes from any unfortunate jabs that they might encounter, but holding them outstretched in front of him was a higher priority to protect the forward movement of his entire body. As he took a slow, jerking step, imagining trip hazards, he felt himself fill with dread imagining a lowly rock blinding his exposed eyes.

Dean twisted his neck around to look at the entrance, and the planet atmosphere left behind outside seemed lighter than it had ever been.

At least it wasn't a cavernous cave. He'd never get back out, if that were the case. No, this was a tunnel.

He climbed perilously over boulders that piled as high as his waist and rocks that slid out from under him, around a cave wall that suddenly appeared and made him think he'd hit a dead end until, hold on, it curves here. No friendly entrance atmospheric light would be found past that. Dean considered turning around until he'd figured out how to bring fire to the world.

He didn't turn around. Dean Winchester gripped the stone and dragged his body along to the other side of the wall, sealed in complete dark. Psychological business.

"No monsters," Dean spoke out loud, softly. "All you have to whuu—"

He catapulted forward, tripping on the smallest of gentle slopes, and bodily launched himself to the side in a successful attempt at saving himself the fall. He bruised his shoulder meat throwing himself at the wall as a result, and scraped his neck.

"Nice," Dean Winchester muttered.

Finally, the tunnel stopped being quite as dark. Slowly, Dean pretended to ignore it and picked his way over to the exit at a tantalizing pace. Bloodlust pulsed low within him, was kept at bay by Dean's focus with a blind footwork puzzle.

He exited the other side of the canyon wall to a lightened world, and the sky was covered in clouds.

Because he had nothing better to do, Dean periled back through the tunnel and found that clouds had appeared over the entire area. He found his stone pile and his water, and started to do his regular stretches to work out his muscles, which he was sure would deteriorate without fuel.

He felt a drop of something wet under his eye and reached for it to check if it was real, but there it was on his finger. He rubbed it between his finger and thumb, and then wiped the back of his hand across his eye to check for tears he hadn't even known he'd shed. The back of his hand came back dry.

Something small but kind of heavy, like a dime, fell to the top of his head. He felt another rain drop hit his balding spot—_ it's not balding,_ Dean reminded himself. _My head is an insult to balding people._

The rain started quickly. Dean retreated to his tunnel entrance just in time for lightning to strike the cliff wall he nestled in, and he felt the punch of it, and then he lost consciousness.

Dean came to because the rainwater was soaking his jeans. He sat up. All of his muscles seized in protest, the ache filling every fiber, and Dean wondered if that was the affect of being struck by lightning or falling back and losing consciousness on a cave floor in denser gravity with malnutrition.

As far as the eye could see, the rocky planet was covered in beautiful water. An inch of water. It trickled through the tunnel, Dean's socks and pants legs greedily soaking it up.

He tried to lap it up like a dog or cat from the planet surface, the first time in his life, but his tongue wasn't shaped properly. He formed a ring with his lips and suctioned the water up instead. It tasted alright, but the film on Dean's tongue might have been masking the most delicious liquid he'd ever encountered. He kept drinking because he needed to, not tasting or feeling much difference but for quenching his need.

He opened his eyes and the little water dripped from his mouth in surprise. Black eyes stared back from his reflection.

_That lightning fucking killed me?!_

He was weirdly at peace. Demonized Dean wasn't a greater harm to anyone anymore than regular marked by Cain Dean. He simply didn't have to eat, drink, or sleep now.

So now he had no drive.

No purpose to stack rocks or cobble together anything else for the function of survival.

Nothing to distract him from the need to bury his nails as far into a throat as they would go and tear at the skin until it flayed apart like gates to the vocal chords, and bury his teeth in the succulent, heaving, hot irony gooey organs and bite down.

There are so many things to do with a neck. Snap it, chop it, sever it at the bone and then there are two pieces.

Dean was excellent at improvisation. Nothing bloody. He cooked up a feast, and the beef well-done in a stew, with vegetables for fiber, eggs cracked artfully on top and seasoned with cilantro and shrimp, and paired it with tall, sweating mint juleps to refresh and chocolate chip cake. He had some bites even though he couldn't enjoy any of it, not really, and Tokyo-iel ate some of his food too because he didn't have the appetite.

He kissed her deeply, tasting the chocolate on her tongue, thrusting his tongue in exploring like an eel in a cave. He wanted to know how deep he could go. The structure of their mouths got in the way, so he hooked his hands on either side of her upper and lower jaw and forced the two apart with a crack, her jaw hanging like a floppy hinge from the skull in a way that made her look not very pretty.

He wanted to see what the food looked like in her stomach, and it looked a lot like the food had before it had gone in, but of course it was in stomach juices and the cake was disintegrated mush. There wasn't much to it roving his hands around in there, but the sensation was kind of nice, like playing in a slimy sandbox and uncovering somethings buried. He found a lot of organs and relearned their anatomy from the inside for the first time in a long time.

He cut off the skin and scraped with his nails the last of the muscle from the bone as best he could, and cracked open a femur over his knee to get a good look at the inside.

When his newest fantasy of several murders and dissections was over in a few hours, and he decided to watch the shallow water, Tokyo-iel crossed her arms unhappily.

"I'm not here to be your torture doll, you sick son of a bitch," she said.

"Yeah. You are," Dean countered.

"Good luck praying to me now."

"What do you mean? I conjure you whenever I want."

"Praying's over," she insisted, and didn't disappear.

Dean started to walk through the tunnel once again. "I'm a demon. I don't need to pray to anyone."

It turned out the planet was more than water and rock, and becoming a demon opened more doors than before, so Dean didn't pity himself. He could dimension walk now.

The sun was like a black light sun, and the dark eyes allowed him to find another dimension on the existing surface. He popped in to maroon planet's version of Hell, with foreign creatures that Dean wasted no time in slaughtering. His bloodlust could finally be satiated for eternity, and all it took was a measly lightning strike to turn this life around. Granted, without a weapon they were unusually grappling fights, but Dean always won. Dean couldn't be killed.

One time Dean returned to the surface to see what the planet looked like in full day time, and good thing he had his natural shades too. The sun was blinding, no clouds to enshroud it and protect it from its glory reaching Dean's prone form, and he had no doubt he would have gone blind without his demon form. Death was a real piece of work. Maybe he needed to do more planet shopping in his free time in case a nuisance like Dean ever cropped up. He returned to the other dimension.

Or maybe Death picked the perfect planet. One second, Dean was in the bowels, a demon with hair and facial hair he'd cut with a monster claw he'd found inside a monster.

The next second, Dean was back on surface world, human, and the atmosphere was oppressive and dark.

Dean breathed, disoriented. "I'm gonna puke."

He puked.

He looked up at the universe. The moon was full. This world hardly changed, but the moon, the puking, the clean body feeling...

It was reminiscent of—

"Time works differently here, huh," Dean said. "So what, I just restart?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *but he didn’t blow air into her vagina, because that’s a super dangerous unsexy idea and has literally actually killed people before.
> 
> *throws the whole phone away*  
Hell is formatting.
> 
> Sex isn't actually that cool and if a teen reads this they will mistakenly think it's super cool, the vagina has no pleasure sensory nerves inside and if your dumb bf thinks he can get you off just by sticking it in you you will not feel anything but uncomfortable. I know your parents are going to rely on the internet to teach you.
> 
> It has been really fun to write and edit this. Please leave a comment if you enjoyed the story! It's really encouraging to read even the word "kudos" or a star emoji and the little gestures. I'm not above taking notes from the audience of where the story can go, I don’t care if it’s considered illegal and wrong. I’m messed up like that.
> 
> I love you lots, fellow SPN fan.


	2. Chapter 2, Break My Heart Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Castiel is perturbed by his feelings for Dean.

"Damn it!" Sam yelled. "I've spent the last two years uploading our archives to this _brick_ and it won't turn on!" He discarded it to the table in disgust.

Cas' heart plummeted. "All of your work is lost?" he asked, to say something.

Sam stared at the dark screen. "Well— I don't know. It must have some sort of cloud or something. It's twenty fifteen, for fuck's sake, isn't everything uploaded to a cloud?" He was already holding his phone and dialing something in when he froze. Sam's eyes snapped to Cas'. It was too late. Cas could hear the tiny voice coming from the phone speaker.

The men listened with bated breath to the answering machine finish with a beep. Cas couldn't hear what she said, but it had been short— and bubbly. Not disconnected yet.

Sam back pocketed his phone. "The thing with clouds is, sometimes there's not enough storage and too much data... a lot of the archive couldn't have been saved."

Cas felt helpless. He didn't know enough about electronic tablets to find a loophole. It was up to Sam to find a way to fix this.

Sam shrugged. "We can't finish this case with these references. It's going to have to be the slow, old fashioned way. Damn. I'm going to the electronics store. Want a ride?"

"No..." Cas didn't want to deal with the unnecessary social interaction with strangers. He decided to get the news over with. "I've invited Rowena. To help."

Sam pulled out his gun. "Oh really?" He dropped his body into a chair. "I'm staying right here. Seriously? We plan these things out, together."

"She's on her way willingly, Sam," Cas said. "She has the book. She's chosen to work on friendly terms," a beat, "with you."

Realization bloomed across Sam's face. "... And not you," he guessed.

"You gave her the book. I invaded her most personal thoughts."

"And stepped away! When you saw who she loved... you let it be. You couldn't kill an innocent guy that turned the heart of a witch."

Sam laughed skeptically. "I can't believe she agreed to do this, if she doesn't like you."

"_You_ don't like _her,_" Cas pointed out, gesturing at the gun on the table. "I know that Rowena can't be trusted with the book. She knows how I feel." But Dean needed to come home with all of the resources they could get.

"We're going to get Dean back."

"I know, Sam."

"He's never been gone for long. A year, tops."

"You know, Rowena isn't due to arrive for another day. She's in Manitou Springs. You can go," Cas informed his friend, who, satisfied, let out a Yeahp and heaved himself up from the chair, getting the gun into his grip as he rose and headed to his room. Cas selected some reading material and let himself be soothed by the ticking black watch on his wrist, waiting for Sam to leave. The journal was a fascinating tale of a poor inquisitive hunter in over his head.

_"He had put his faith in a great black stone and had not been able to converse with ancient shadows and marvels behind the town. He did not know how to get near them or spy upon them._

_"So the ghoul that was Olimar taught him how to get near the myriad cats of the city and at the highest hill he sought out the last of them. And when Carter heard only the sum of what I now know from letters and exhibits... he went crazy._

_"The closed blinds allowed him to see that the Other Gods in the cold waste taunted insolently the mild gods in their midst."_

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Cas frowned. He was being intruded by a violent memory of staring, vacant, at the angel blade which was forced into the floor next to his head. He recalled the cuts on his face that bled so much. The physical pain was a distant ghost that he could not accurately remember the feeling of, currently. But he'd felt it a thousand times before and looked forward to it in the future.

Some households used devices to diffuse cinnamon and lavender into the air with white, humid clouds. Comfortable homes that welcomed old spice FBI agents in with misgivings. In the living memory of the oak floor Cas wondered if he had then measured time by heartbeat to heartbeat, or if that was only attributed after, in retrospect, as he relived the scene at an observer's pace. He unveiled the events in his mind, calling for the arrival of the details patiently. Cas remembered he had been terrified, and even that was washed away now in the calm ambiance of the temperature controlled bunker, with its waft of ammonia bleach and cleaning supplies so inescapable that the element immersed itself with his lungs. Castiel was relaxed to the exchange in his lungs of bleach and carbon dioxide.

The pain and terror and the initial reek of the air before adjusting to the bleach could all be eased into the distant was, but there began an onslaught of raw emotion that cropped up and mutated into new, constant spinning thoughts. New hurts.

He determined to reread his paragraph until it made sense.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

_" ... but which was holding the creatures their ways being better known to haunt most persistently the dreams of men."_

Castiel loved Dean. He loved his soul. Once he stood alongside his soul long enough, he had begun to be drawn in to its magnetic attraction. Nobody else seemed to notice— or they did. Crowley had stuck around for a while. Maybe countless others felt the pull. But Castiel wasn't sure which of Dean's admirer's entered his circle for which reasons, and in the end nobody seemed to see what Castiel did, or else they would still be here. Dancing to Dean Winchester's thrum and thrall that existed independent of his physical appearance. Independent even of his personality. His tarnished, human soul.

Perhaps Cas had become too ensnared. To realize he was hardly a free agent.

It was no wonder he hadn't noticed before. They spent so much time apart, didn't they? Phone calls, but infrequent and lacking in the finer details of the week. They led separate lives and focused on their tasks at hand for sometimes weeks at a time without a care. They weren't exactly needy. Castiel had always considered himself autonomous, and the heartstring tied to Dean was for the angel to make sure he always found himself returned home. Not a _leash_. He made sure to come home and slip into Dean's bed occasionally after a split job, whenever they were both in Kansas, whenever the end of Cas' work abroad, well, ended.

The shared living space. They all knew. Every demon, every angel. Now that was a subject that Castiel was critically aware was the talk of the supernatural sphere. He'd primarily not even cared himself that he and Dean had— had their carnal pleasures, once. He knew it was supposed to be kept secret , and hadn't cared about the exercise enough to dispute it. Intercourse was in most ways like drinking tea. When Castiel was still a servant of Heaven, Castiel was made more aware shortly that Dean's space was widely speculated.

It was a symbol of loyalty branded to him a la Scarlet Letter for all to have their chance at manipulating him, or

for his would-be opponents to know and avoid Cas' wrath out of fear should they attempt to harm his compatriots, or

for being made a laughing stock.

Sneered at. Castiel, the wretched thing. In with a Winchester. Dean received the same snide remarks. He never refuted them.

Many, many days had passed since they last had sex. They had passed into years. Not that Castiel considered encounters a valid measurement for the passing of time. He knew that Jeff Staves, an aluminum manufacturing plant worker, never thought about sex except when his girlfriend offered him her erotic romance novels to read. Just as he knew Paškal Casimiro masturbated almost every night. All things he shouldn't know, but had pressed for when scanning people on sex-related topics.

Dean liked sex. He masturbated frequently. Castiel enjoyed the closeness of the furnace hot skin of Dean's palms brushing every inch of his body that he had a mind to reach. They caressed each other, petting and pressing their heated fingers in little but lethal doses of tricep massages as they did their human act, and stayed comfortably glued spine to stomach after, nearly too testosterone warm but not yet. It was the most comfortable Castiel ever felt, moments he never wanted to leave. To think, he could have missed out on the serenity of holding and being held, lost it to the vacuum of the cosmic order, ancient, unresting.

If Castiel could enter Dean's heaven and stay there for eternity, he wouldn't mind laying together with shirts and jackets tossed aside on memory foam forever.

He wouldn't mind getting there intact. But if he was being honest, Dean had been decaying when he wasn't looking, when he wasn't there. And when he was. Dean was daily in an environment of Hell tainted mire.

He was sure Dean was Dean. He was sure, as they say, that something hadn't come in the night and snuck into Dean's body when he wasn't looking, he was sure that the reflection in the mirror was the man with the magnetic soul, and the conviction came so solid and purposeful because Cas didn't know another way.

He found himself... for the first time, in a long time, afraid that he was on the wrong side of his own convictions. That choosing a team didn't mean forever.

He'd meant it. He would watch Dean murder the world. God himself could come down, and say, What have you done to my children? I created life, I let you have this miracle, and this is what you have done to it? and Dean would say Yes I have and take a slash at God, too. Castiel grew nauseous at the image of his Father turning one speculative eye on His rogue son.

Castiel, who I have bestowed countless Mercy and remade in the image of your choosing, He'd appeal. Most loyal to creation, self sworn to protect them. Why have you turned against the greatest thing that has ever happened to you?

Castiel's throat tightened. He confessed silently to himself, I thought I was remade in the image of the one who had shown me the way. I was loyal to him, self sworn to him. He is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. I was trying to stop him, protect him.

But not humanity.

Sam emerged dressed properly for the weather. He climbed up the metal staircase. Cas heard the sound of rain slapping when he opened the bunker door, and then it was soundproof once again.

Tick.

Tick.

Castiel placemarked the page with a beaded necklace he bought in Arizona, equipped with two plastic black feathers. He did his best to arrange one of the feathers so that it underscored his last line.

_"I think I wrote the revolver was clutched in his right hand and he was equipped with formidable talons... all useless artifacts in that instance."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that hunter? Was H.P. Lovecraft.
> 
> End note.


	3. Chapter 3, Four, Five, Six You Were Never Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Rowena promises them they can find a way to access Dean there, Castiel and Sam attend a party of elite witches

"Do you know what you need, dear?" 

Rowena leaned forward on the outdoor glass patio table and sipped her iced chai held lightly between lithe fingers. They were unpainted but manicured, with a smooth clear coat top encasing the nails. Rowena was alive when hatpin panic prevailed, and she was damned sure men needed to be reminded that strong nails were perfectly designed for embedding, tearing, and scraping flesh bloody. She made up her mind to dig into Jonoubeh's wrist when she saw her. Nothing spells dangerous bitch at first impression like a powerful handshake.

"What do I need?" Castiel entertained, practically rolling his eyes. They sat under a shared umbrella in the jet setting part of town. Modern chic, thin stone panel lined halfway up the walls and thoughtfully planned landscaping, ducks. Nothing like where Castiel just came from, dead center of the States and practically tumbleweed. She could see billowing frustration like a metal grill releasing wavy, distorted heat extending from the man, it radiated hot off of that grubby coat. She understood the short patience, she really did, not a lot of people could stand her presence. That Charlie girl just died and Rowena was around for that, hardly involved.

It was bound to taint the relationship between the tired lapdog and her own fleeting agenda. But she couldn't help but feel that a lot of this was misdirected resentment. Crowley was her son and she couldn't change that. Resentment should be doled out accurately, and Rowena preferred to be out of favor for her own nasty deeds, not whatever the hell Crowley has been up to. Charlie was unfortunate. Rowena was naturally annoying, it wasn't her fault. She couldn't be blamed for her death.

Rowena decided she was craving barbecue. She snapped her fingers in the lapdog's face. "What are yer powers capable of, if you're so great? Can you summon us some lunch?"

"No." Castiel said it as if he were being put upon.

Rowena squinted a feral, but beautiful smile. She straightened up until she was looking down her nose at the grump.

"I bet I've got mair power than you in my pinkie."

"I believe you were going somewhere before you got distracted by your superiority complex."

"Yi'll need tae get that stick out of your ass," she laughed, breezily. "Come on, Castiel. I get so tired of the dead hard dealings gaun oan. What's the point of getting so old if you can't luxuriate?" He was giving nothing. "What, did you think I'd plop the book down oan this dining table?"

"What you're proposing isn't productive," Castiel said, icily. Suddenly he looked lost, but he wasn't looking at her. He had that concerned frown on he face as he surveyed the populace walking around. "I have to focus on what's at stake here."

"Fancy a day out in my life? We'll be mair inclined to help eachother if you stoap looking so peely-wally."

"What are you suggesting."

"I mean I'm tired of bein' serious today! I'm waantin' tae eat barbecue wi' arugula salad n I'm not even kidding, you should try on some freish clothes. Good Will rejections aren't attractive."

He hesitated. She saw it. He was considering throwing caution to the wind! Mingling with people who didn't live in an underground bunker.

"All the years oan this earth n he might just stairt living. Let's go." She picked up her large shiny handbag and rooted around. "I'm beginning to suspect you don't eat so you don't have te pay. Cheapskate."

"I... have acquired a taste for certain things," Cas revealed. They made their way down the street. A girl saw Cas and smiled at him in a friendly manner as they were about to pass on the sidewalk. Castiel met her gaze, unsmiling, and then they passed eachother. Rowena scoffed inwardly. He could have anything he wanted if he had an ounce more charm.

"Oh, yeah? What?"

"I don't drink coffee that often. I mostly skip breakfast. But some foods."

Being rugged handsome wasn't enough. Charisma was so far out of reach Rowena could barely see it high tailing.

"Have you ever been to a pairty?"

"Uhh." Castiel said. "For a case, once."

"My old friend Jonoubeh and I are attending in a mansion of the upper neighborhood. You may be down but you're not out yet." Her voice rose in a pseudo speculative octave. "I _cuid_ use someone oan my arm to take care of things if some unsavory people show up..." Rowena took the rather bold initiative of looping her arm around the stiff brown coat arm, her hand fluttering up to rest in a loose fist near her breast to lock him in a couple's walk. A locket hung from her neck within reaching distance, and she touched its smooth exterior absentmindedly. "There's a witch there who can perform a porter spell. Transports you anywhere you want, I swear."

Castiel pretended she wasn't clutching his arm and kept walking. "Now why do you think there's going to be any trouble?"

Smart cookie. Always asking so many questions. "Dear, not all witches are as beguiling as I am. I know some very depraved individuals who would sell you for a damned vial of crushed hairy beardtongue, and that's because they're old enough to know how to uise it." She thought some. "And I don't know who knows I have the book. They might think I'll be able to leid them to it. You and Sam wull be a big help getting what we need dane quickly."

Castiel let himself be led by into a naturally lit shop with a domed sky ceiling window. A male voice from somewhere greeted them cordially. "I'll call him. I believe you, and Sam will want to be there."

"Great. This place haes a tailor in at certain hours, come back 'ere wi' Samuel and he can get fitted. James! Hello, pet! I'm going to ask a big favor of you, if you're up to task."

She hailed a handsome man in a casual but smart-fitting pale shirt. Another person looked up from where he was concentrating at the checkout desk. The handsome man's personal style was rather bland, but the clothes he sold were nothing short of gorgeous. He flashed his teeth. "Rowena! What brings you to the area today?"

"Business trip. This is my ex-boyfriend Marc, he's here fur he lost all of his clothes giein' it away to charity. Such a generous man. It's too bad you left the hail hoose to look efter rats wi'oot a home. That's the organization, 'Rats Without a Home'." She made sure to emphasize the last part, and then turned to address Castiel. "I wid have stayed with you, but you know I don't approve of you purposefully riling the rats up whenever you play the piano." She let out a wistful sigh. James blinked, his smile having gone slack as he listened to his client's explanation.

"You want to replace your whole wardrobe?" James asked Castiel, unsure.

Rowena diverted James' attention back to her swiftly. "He can't afford that, sadly. But I wull cover him a few pieces. Something we can go to an event in." Castiel stared wide-eyed at his ex. Adoration, surely. "It's the least I can do, fur all of the charity ye'v given to the world." She patted Castiel's arm.

Castiel nodded. "Right."

"That's great." James stuck his hand out to his client. "I'm James. Do you have any idea what you're interested in, or do you need help getting started?" Rowena floated away to look at some dresses.

Marc looked down at himself and opened up his trench to examine something within. "A new coat might be in order."

James started off with showing Marc the simple dress shirts similar to the one he was already wearing, asking personal questions and sharing some of his own anecdotes along the way. He wanted to get a feeling for what Marc would be doing in these clothes, and what he should wear when he wasn't doing any of those things.

"Do you still live in your home, or is it all to the rats now?" James asked, absolutely baffled by his guest. The tailor named Harris stopped studying behind the checkout and inched over, pretending to count jackets or something.

"I did donate my home to the rats. They require a lot of cheese." Harris snorted, and James gave him a look that wasn't received. Harris was still pretending to be interested in the texture of his merchandise.

So they went, Rowena coming and going to make sure he was getting along, and to state, "Blue. Whitevur it is has got to be dark blue, anythin' else is foreign."

"I can pay for myself." Castiel promised at checkout. He took out his stolen credit card and charged it for all the haul was worth. He liked James and was sorry to leave him. A man with a son and daughter who he was looking forward to skiing with next month, and he was building a deck with his sister's extended family. Very few people had shared themselves so openly and extensively to Castiel before, all of the information flowed voluntarily and without pretense. Cas didn't even have to touch him to scan his thoughts, to know James didn't like pasta but loved a mean crépe pizza. The man asked Cas if he had any children, and Cas told him no, though he wouldn't be opposed to them.

"Well, it was so nice to meet you, Marc. Stop by any time you're in town." James clasped Cas' hands in a handshake of some sort. "Good luck to you. It was very interesting to hear you've planted thousands of trees in your lifetime in an effort to combat the ruthless slaughter of Christmas trees. Maybe it's not my place, but Rowena is very fond of you, and a friend of her's is a friend of mine."

Rowena elected herself the woman at the wheel tonight, because "that hazard wouldn't be allowed up the mountain". The gravel crunched under tall tires as she pulled up in an enormous dark Cadillac Escalade. She hopped out, ridiculously small outside of her car in dancing flats and a chiffon shirt with high waisted chiffon skirt. Her hands were littered in several rings, enough to be a lightning rod, and she'd done up her hair in a pony tail. Sam couldn't help but think the witch was beautiful.

He was kind of pissed off at Cas. He'd abandoned Sam when he needed him, sitting in the bunker, about to track down what he thought was a kotengu based in a Colorado town. Perfect, Rowena was in the mountains, they could meet her where she was. He thought they were going to confront Rowena together, but Castiel met her for lunch alone and went shopping without informing his friend of it, and Sam had to follow him to the cannabis state alone.

Sam had already passed on a working lead to another hunter yesterday. New monsters were cropping up all over, and Castiel never stuck around long enough to help out. He was chipping away at the Dean problem and ignoring the guy who just lost his brother . Sam needed Castiel to be there to back him up if a monster got one over him and the angel was always off somewhere instead, this time with a dangerous witch who obviously didn't like him.

Jesus.

Sam rubbed his face. This is something some communication could fix.

If the journey up was full of tension, it didn't compare to the hushed silence that fell as they rolled up to the mansion's wide cement drive behind a litter of other vehicles. Sam stepped out into the cooling air and blinked up at the stars, surprised there were so many of them, a large canvas sprayed across the ceiling above towering black trees. He swallowed and his ears popped from the pressure. Some of the mansion windows were lit, tinkling music escaping from the double front door wide open. Someone inside laughed. Sam felt for his gun. This was the kind of night where things went wrong, if someone caught wind of who they were.

Rowena came around the hood and caught his eye in the dark. "They won't know who you are without Dean." She popped one of the numerous rings from her finger and whispered into it nestled in her cupped palm. The air smelled faintly of metal. She grabbed Sam's hand and slipped the band onto his ring finger easily. "Resized it for ya. Now you're my husband." She trotted to the house.

Cas sans trench coat stood next to Sam as they both looked at the new ring. "Do you trust her?" Cas asked, now that Sam had already been brushed with magic.

"Whatever," Sam said. They walked together.

Sam surveilled the group inside as much as he could before he had to focus on the grandmotherly older woman he was being introduced to.

"My husband. He used to be a fine witch until he was cursed. Doesn't make me love him any less, and the important bits still work, you know," Rowena rambled, leaning into Sam for a long second before rushing away to see someone she knew. She stopped and turned around, adding disinterestedly, "Och, aye, that one's my husband's friend, he's a witch too," in as bored a tone as she could muster and left them in her dust.

"Welcome to my home," the withered woman said. Sam caught sight of himself in a full length mirror across the room. He was smartly suited up in black without a tie over his white dress shirt, and there was Cas in his fitted suit—

Sam pulled Cas away forcefully further into the room and away from the front door. He leaned in low to his friend's ear and muttered, "Stay away from the mirror. I just saw some kind of white light energy. It was emitting from you."

The guests chattered and ate fruit or popcorn on little plates that they got from somewhere Sam couldn't ascertain. He got the distinct feeling this was an open house without a guest list, and that worried him as well.

"Excuse me, where did you get that food?" Castiel asked of a young woman in a blue dress. Sam's eyes landed on Rowena as another woman hissed argumentatively at her that they were supposed to arrive together. He heard Rowena defensively saying that there was a change of plans as Cas thanked the woman and strode off in search of the kitchen.

"Wait! Wait." Sam kept in step with his friend. "I've been meaning to talk to you. I'm tired of you always leaving without letting me know or telling where you're going. Why did you go with Rowena alone?"

Cas didn't answer, because they'd already reached the kitchen and it was bustling with guests staying in sight of the buffet holding their own mini conversations. All vegan, as far as Sam could tell, relieved. It made him appreciate being in the monster's lair a little more knowing they didn't eat meat. He watched Castiel reach out and gather some fruit on a plate.

"Uh," he grinned. "What are you doing?"

"Eating," Cas said.

"Like, f-for the sake of it?"

Sam had only ever witnessed Castiel eat to join in on family time at the bunker, and only when Dean made the food himself, not for pizza or Chinese. He never ate for the reason of anything like hunger or flavor. As it turns out, Castiel pisses as a side effect of beer, so Sam can imagine there's a reason for it.

"Yes," Cas agreed with him and selected a grape.

"Oookay." Wealthy witches passed by them, unaware of the imposters in their midst. Sam glanced furtively around. What the hell. He stole one of the world's smallest cake slices with his hand and popped it into his mouth, exiting the kitchen through an archway to explore.

The house grew creepier as it left the classy stockholders (all who had threats held to their investment advisors) and revealed its contents in an unlit hallway. It was filled with more tchotchkes and artifacts than they had books in the bunker, all of it kept to the sides so the large hallway had plenty of room to walk through. Furniture and piles of unused things stacked high. Sam inched forward in the dark, unlocking his phone to use as a flashlight. He heard Cas follow him as he turned into one room and followed it through to another, then up the stairs which didn't even allow for relief from random decor— the staircase wall had shelves, masks, and framed pictures adorning it, the steps themselves had dolls and statues placed on every stair as well. Nothing like the clean anteroom the majority of guests mingled in.

"Cas, you mind getting out your phone?" Sam asked and turned around. He was surprised with a sudden blinding flood of flashing orange light, and then realized hundreds of multicolored wax candles were spontaneously lit in the room surrounding him. The person in the room behind him wasn't Cas.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you," the man said sheepishly. "I wanted to talk with you, and then I was curious what you were looking for." He gestured at the candles. "You needed a light."

Sam recovered and took his hand off of his gun. "Uh. I was looking for a bathroom."

The man looked like he didn't believe him. Sam wouldn't either, with all of this junk lying around, begging to be picked through and taken away. "It's downstairs."

"Thanks." Sam gave him a fleeting grin and nervously pushed past him. He curled his fingers by his gun, just in case.

"Your wife told me to find you. She said tallest man in the room, can't miss him." The guy didn't budge.

"She did?" Sam was surprised. "Are you the portal guy?"

"I am!" the witch said. "And I can open a portal for you, but I have to do it in front of everybody. It's all about exhibits of power here, you know." He became apologetic. "I mean, I'm sure you were quite powerful before the curse. Er, let's go."

"Sure," Sam said, bewildered.

They caught up with Cas in the main room, who raised a glass of wine in greeting. The hostess was busy residing over an exchange of books between three house guests and a fourth who was withholding what appeared to be reading glasses to accompany the books. A young appearing, laughing and swaying couple (though most witches appeared young) by the speakers' string orchestra accidentally got too close to the exchange and hurried away, embarrassed at having come close to dancing.

Rowena watched the couple scatter. "I love to shaw aff with a dance. If my husband would only join me." She glanced up at his face above her.

"Not gonna happen tonight, honey," Sam smiled through his teeth.

"But this is my song," she pressed. She had a lot of songs that were hers, but still. "I won't let thaim know that I picked you up from the gawin' circus, I'm too good."

"You worked in a circus?" Sam's lightbringing companion asked, eyeing his sharp attire.

"Look," Rowena wrapped her fingers around Sam's arm and guided him a few steps away from the men.

Sam's eyes bugged when she stuck her hand in his back pocket. "Whoa! Not appropriate."

"Et ego invocabo." Rowena muttered into his lapel. Sam shoved her away by her shoulders.

Rowena strode across the room, unhurt. "Tha do chasan mhaighstir," she whispered. She wiggled her feet on the musty carpet and shifted into listening to the music, sensing a swelling crescendo coming up. Music without words was begging for her to represent.

When the time hit and she found it, Rowena cascaded across the floor back at Sam, who caught her in a dip as she fell into him. She lifted her leg to accentuate the dance move and earned a few more eyes on her, then pulled the hulking Sam back into the center.

To his credit, if she were in his shoes, she would also have the look of stupid amazement on her face as Sam did. All she did was speak a little Gaelic and slip her favorite herb packet onto him and he wasn't in charge of his feet. The arms were a problem, but nobody would notice.

She coaxed the young witches— and they really were young, she could tell they made their riches fast, not like the old money frenemies she knew here— and they joined Rowena and Sam, intimidated by her years of practice. They would make her look good.

Sam seemed to accept his new status and used his arms to catch his date whenever she got near, finding his feet led him from the North side traveling East, center, and in small circles. The other couple got braver. Rowena decided she was sick of them and, holding Sam's big paw in her hand, thumped the man on the back of his head mid pivot. "I'm so sorry!" Sam gushed. Rowena tripped the woman before she could stop her momentum.

She looked down at the sprawling woman. "Happens to the best of us," she purred.

She continued, lifting her arms high and sashaying at the hips, feet working a half running dance in the the dance area provided. She grabbed Sam's broad hands again and tugged, inciting him to join her.

Sam's feet continued to move him. He felt like a show horse circling the ring, and he wasn't going to lie. The exaltation caught up to him. He let out a laugh, his long strides much less frequent than hers as she pranced, just enough to keep up and plenty of stopping. He picked her up by the hips and lifted her briefly, then he spun her and let her go like a top. When the song was finished three minutes later they were both breathing hard.

"I'm thirsty. Want anythin'?" she said to Sam.

"No. No, I'm fine." Sam smoothed his coat jacket.

"Contentus."

"Yeah, I would say we did pretty good," Sam replied.

Cas sidled up to his friend. "I didn't know you could dance." 

"Well, I needed a few credits in college," Sam replied. "Guess I still got it."

"You were very good."

"I think you become more coordinated as you get older," he explained.

Rowena was spending a few minutes to herself appreciating the feeling of her body temperature cooling, downing a sparkling blackberry drink feeling satisfied, watching guests file past with vials and bags of bones and nasty ingredients, when the gunshots erupted. "Dammit," she muttered. The back door would be easy to get to. Rowena always scouted out an escape plan, but she wasn't about to go. Na, she need to run toward th' ducking danger.

"Eruptus!" She shouted into the room as she stormed it. Someone to her left didn't have the right protection spell, their head exploded. "Shit," she muttered. "Pessum dae!" She thrust her arms out at the room, forcing everyone up as though a tidal wave rolled under their feet, upending them back-first on the floor.

This would give her only a few precious seconds to sleuth out what the hell went wrong. Long-dead snake bodies were dumped at Sam's lying form, where he was separated from his gun by several meters, but vials and jewelry and dead critters were dumped all over the place from the floor trade amongst occultists. Mihovil had opened a portal to somewhere dark and arid, and the temperature in the room was rising from the gaping hole in the fabric.

One half of the young money couple she didn't know was dead. His face was one of total shock, blood ruining his lily white shirt irreparably. His girlfriend was struggling to get up. Her eyes locked on to Rowena's and she knew the young witch was a runner. Wasn't coming back to pick up his body if she made it out. The girl transformed into a cat and leapt at top speed over his body and out of the house.

Among the other demons she'd failed to mention were in attendance to Sam and Castiel, and among the magickal folks whom she knew had all hated her guts at some point or another, was a stranger with dark jeans and a canvas jacket as if he had just come in from outside. His gun was still in his hand, and his head was propped up from the floor, aiming at her heart.

Young witches are sloppy. The youngest are the ones who attract hunters. Those fecking dumbasses. They likely bathed in the wrong family's blood last week and bought a flannel.

Nobody here was going to lift a digit to save Rowena except for herself.

"Iomghaoth. Vasti." She invoked, furious.

Somebody battered her delicate body like a full throttle truck as they tackled her to the ground and stabbed her in the neck. Pain seared. She stared wildly up at Catarina, her blonde hair whipping in the internal tornado Rowena'd just summoned into the room. Cumulated items broke against the wall next to her, a ripped page flew by at high speed directly in front of her face. She felt the tremble as the house shook to contain the pressure of the winds. Something thick, a beam in the the ceiling above them snapped leaving the structural integrity to question.

"If I'm gonna die tonight, I want to make sure you do too," the blonde bitch seethed. "Protero." The witch kissed a broken 18th century carving knife. "Protero!" She jabbed it into Rowena's shoulder and tore.

"Oh!" The redhead managed to gasp.

"Tarmes." A different, familiar voice close by added cruelly. The gale from the cyclone was whipping at Rowena, and she could only hope the chaos was making it impossible for the hunter across the room to get a correct shot.

The gun erupted in more shots, each bullet's staccato release deafening in its proximity. Shitting hell.

The sound of shoes and voices as the best dressed on the mountain tonight made their mad dash to escape, or maim the attacker, though Rowena was sure she had just laid a killing on him that would be in effect soon, and if anyone was paying attention to her when she'd made her entrance they shouldn't be stupid enough to shite time. She felt the vibrations under the floorboards beneath her. Good luck pulling the cars out orderly, she thought, the pain giving her an intense dizzy spell. And now came the uncomfortable feeling of worms blossoming inside of her, boring holes in her intestines.

Rowena followed the damning voice of her second attacker to gaze into Jonoubeh's eyes, the action of looking in any direction hurting her eyeballs, Jonoubeh who did not come to her aid. She thought they had made themselves as something like allies. But here she was, killing her doubly.

The witches scrambled up and left Rowena to die horribly. A car alarm wailed. It went off and off and off and off and fell silent. She heard the unmistakable crush of one bumper hitting another. She felt her body grow heated.

It got quiet when the living bodies finally disappeared. The dead ones were still here. Rowena, sweating, slipped out of consciousness, grimacing in pain as her limbs stilled while her heaving torso was the only sign she was still occupying herself. The storm she summoned dissipated with her feeble mind.

She came to a few seconds later, Castiel's hand glowing on her stomach. She watched his strange celestial magick, and then his face. It was determined. He is such a good boy, she thought, but she wasn't feeling better, only awake.

"I'm so sorry," Castiel promised her. He was still trying to heal her with the white light trick.

She wished she could tell him it was okay. It was well enough that an angel tried to save her. She wished she hadn't gotten Charlie killed, honestly, but if that wee gal hadn't made it Rowena didn't really deserve to, either.

A single pulse rushed through the air and Rowena felt it.

She was perfectly fine again, though still hot. "Wha—?" She sat up like on a spring, crashing heads with Castiel, who was knocked back with the force of the bump. He had been sitting next to her on his bum, leaning over her.

Cas gingerly touched his nose.

Sam stood frozen in front of the arid portal, having sensed the same. Then he stuck his hand through the image, waving it through the the clear image of the planet, the portal's outer edge's haze, and the mansion's room. His hand passed in front of the backdrop like the portal wasn't there. He stuck his dress shoe into the rocky terrain, and dragged it sideways into the carpeted room, and small purple rocks nestled in the fibers. "I can step through this," he announced.

"That doesn't look like Death's library," Castiel said.

"I know." Sam said. He walked into the frame and stood on the world, drenched in night. "It's a planet." He wiped his forehead. "It's a furnace out here."

"What if it closes when you're out there?" Rowena asked, nervous. Mihovil was dead, a bullet through his skull. Unlike her storm, his portal was still open after his execution. She envied his ability. Some occurrences come naturally to witches, though, inherent and unable to be taught.

"Then I'm screwed." Sam turned around to face her and held out his hand. "Want to stand on another planet?"

She stared at him in awe, speechless.

The witch hunter couldn't help but share this impossible thing with her, of all things.

She managed to heave herself up from the floor. She looked around at the damage, a few men and women with bullets in them. An exploded head. Not a lot of casualties. It smelled like blood. She was used to it. Delivered worse than a quick bullet to a certain quota a year, really. But she was considered a bit more ruthless a woman in all of the occult circles. That's why they decided to be ruthless back.

Rowena accepted Sam's invitation by stepping carefully through the doorway, aware that she should be reverent on another planet. She felt reverent.

It was _incomprehensible_ to be standing here.

"When Mihovil messes up, he gets it soo right," she said.

"Unbelievable. Marvelous."

Sam smiled at her.

Cas stepped through behind them. Sam asked him, "Can we close it?"

"I can't," Castiel replied. "How are you feeling, Rowena?"

"Alive." She blew out a hard breath. "Like I'm high oan giddiness. And not one, but two people tried to kill me wi' th'excuse of the chaos. They couldn't have saved two seconds getting their butts out of the line of fire?" Actually, she felt a good deal healthier than just alive. Cas had been working his angel energy on her when the pulse came and healed her. She felt super charged.

"How you feeling, Cas?" Sam asked, noticing Cas behind them was looking like he was feeling peculiar.

Cas flexed his hand. "My grace is stronger than it's been lately. A minute ago I couldn't heal Rowena. You should have died," he told her.

"Thanks." She said.

Sam's expression shifted. "Mihovil."

Mihovil stood on the other side of the portal, cleaned up.

"You guys aren't going to try to kill me, are you?"

"What are you doing alive?" asked Sam.

"I've been alive. I illusioned myself dead in case you tried to kill me," he said, nervous. "I just watched other dead people get up and leave." He turned insistent. "Fey doesn't believe in resurrection spells, but she got up just like any of them."

The three of them walked back through the portal.

"Something's changed," Cas announced. "I think we'd better leave. Dean's not through this window."

Mihovil watched them leave. A snake slithered under a side table.

They piled into the Escalade, one of the last vehicles on the property, silently like the first time but with an entirely different mood. Rowena tried to ignore her close call with death once again. She resolved to do something about that. A resurrection spell. She didn't believe that all of those witches had resurrection spells, they couldn't have. Some of them just weren't that powerful, and would need a hefty bribe to get one of the other hags to even attempt it. She imagined all of those witches walking around, alive when they shouldn't be. She felt unnerved.

"Maybe I shouldn't take the motor," she said, hands on the wheel. "This car's too big for me. I usually call a Lyft, you know. It's a rental."

Sam opened the passenger door and climbed out, exchanging seats with Rowena without a word. He sat on something for the second time, and reached for his back pocket.

"What the hell is this?!" he said, throwing it to the ground. "Someone hexed me!"

"Err," Rowena looked out the window. "T'was a protection spell. Don't worry about it."

Someone who must have been hiding in the house walked hurriedly to their sleek silver car. She stopped in her tracks to look at where the Escalade parked, a spooked animal caught in its headlights. She tucked her hair behind her ear and slammed her car shut behind her, pulling out into the darkness.

Sam sighed. "I'm going crazy. If Dean were here, I could tell him who that reminded me of." He maneuvered the car back onto the smooth, curving road.

"You can tell us anyway," Castiel suggested. Sam's voice was a comfort.

"I might know them," Rowena interjected from her reclined seat, arm over her eyes. How could it have gone wrong so quickly. She was depleted. Time to sleep for a million years.

He nodded. "Okay." The darkness zipped by. Sam had to admit, he was finally in a car that he could stretch his legs in. His whole body fit comfortably. He rolled down the window and let the night flying by set the temperature. The Winchester impala was noisy, and needed wide turns. Not at all like this thing, which glided over the blacktop.

"So, a long time ago. Had to be eight years ago. We ran into this girl named Bela." The pair listened to Sam tell the story of who she was, and how she ended up. Their ears popped heading down the mountain.

"I regret it. We thought she was evil. But we didn't know what true evil was. No offense, Rowena, but she was much nicer than you." He shrugged. "She was human. And for some reason we thought she was the monster. So, if that was her, I wouldn't track her down." He pressed his lips together. "She doesn't need me poking around."

"I don't know of any witch named Bela."

"You realize, if that was her, she's a demon," Castiel said.

"And who's fault is that?" Sam asked.

Sam drove them to his and Cas' motel. They had booked different rooms, thanks to Cas taking off early.

Rowena said, "Ah. It's been a fun time."

Sam unlocked his motel door wordlessly and shut it behind him.

Rowena pressed her lips into a delicate line of painted on lipstick. "Good night, then."

Castiel turned to her. "If you don't want to drive back, you can have my room. I don't sleep."

Rowena hesitated before releasing a small smile. "That's very kind of you, dear."

The angel dug his room key out of his jacket.

He sat outside of the motel rooms, in the Escalade, listening to the all night classic rock station set to low volume. He thought about how they had lost out on their bet that Mihovil could get them to Dean.

"What do you want." Sam groaned.

"I've become more and more human lately. I'm attempting to enjoy it, now, instead of just bearing with it," Castiel started.

"'Kay," Sam said face first into his pillow, annoyingly awake.

"I only decided to do that yesterday. It's why I've made up my mind to eat, as I've developed taste."

"That's so good for you."

"Sam. There is a vending machine outside of this motel. They sell pork rinds. Pork rinds is a taste I've managed to develop outside of its molecular components."

Sam waited, trying to breathe deeply into the pillow. It wasn't really conducive to sleep, he was kind of suffocating. He flipped over.

"I can't taste them anymore. I drank wine earlier this evening, I haven't had to urinate since, Sam, this is a breakthrough!" Cas said excitedly. "I'm more angel than I have been in a long time."

Sam got up. "Can you fly?" he asked.

"No."

Sam crossed his arms.

"It seemed important," Cas deflated.

"Sorry, Cas. I am. You're stronger now. I'm happy for you, buddy. Your're, uh, still feeling like yourself though, right?"

"Yes. I am. I'll let you know first thing if that stops being the case." Cas nodded once.

"Great. I'm going to sleep now."


	4. Chapter 4, Spirit In The Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A powered-up Castiel has to convince Dean that he’s real in order to bring him back home.

For decency's sake, Dean on Earth had tended to keep his shirt on most of the time.

In cloaked-in-night world, Dean risked being rescued by unfortunate eyes at the time of him being shirtless and pantless, but no more than that.

Instead of piling rocks, he walked away from the wall for hours until the atmosphere started to lighten incrementally.

Hell had prepared him for all kinds of tortures. He had never experienced the absolute silence he heard when he stopped walking and held his breath to listen.

The heartbeat in Dean's ears was becoming apparent and distracting. The steady throb grew into a coppery beat that incited something increasingly tribal with each hammer, impossible to ignore as his head filled with the Mark's call to hunt.

Each heart beat made up a siren song stronger than any call to the ocean. The siren pulled red brine into its pools, trapping his burning, murderous thoughts like little mussels and sea stars in the depressions of his brain. The siren was Dean, and he was sweating in the blanket of the atmosphere outside, burning up hotter within himself, head in searing blood. 

Dean rasped out, in disused chords, "Uhm." He swallowed. "H-hey."

_Fuck you, Cain._

"H-hhhhhhey. Jude..." he croaked, walking. Don't make it bad. "Don't make it bad... take a sad song... and make it better."

Dean swallowed.

_Hey Jude, don't be afraid._

_You were made to_

_go out_

_ and get her._

_The minute you let her under your skin._

_Then you begi-in, to make it better._

"And anytime you feel the pain!" Dean belted, continuing forward. "Hey Jude, refrain. Don't carry the world up on your shoulders... na-na-na, na, na-na-na, naa... then you'll begin to make it better... better, better," Dean snarled at the top of his lungs into the vacuous planet,  
"BettER, BETTER, AAA!" A blip of white light lit up the world behind him. "N—"

Hell had prepared Dean for all kinds of terrors, but he had never experienced the exact terror he suddenly felt as he heard the roll of thunder breach the silence of the stadium. He'd thought his screainging was the loudest in the world, but it was relative. Thunder reverberated through the rock terrain and punched Dean's jackrabbit heart right into his throat, nerve endings tingling in sympathetic memory.

"No need to show me up, dude." Dean brushed his hands along his exposed arms, the bristling, staticky hair standing up regardless, finally breathing free of sweaty skin.

Somewhere behind him he should be dead by now. Fried in a cave. 

The warm rain dropped from the sky, prompting Dean to sniff his armpit as though _rain_ meant _shower._

He lay down and drifted, imagining the warm drops were like hands petting him to sleep.

"I heard that's how they torture people in China!" Sam enthused, carrying in his toaster oven. Dean held the motel room door open for him.

Sam was about eleven years old. Dean must have been fifteen, around then, the age where he and Sam were always having two conversations at once but knowing exactly what the other was referring to. He watched Sam put down the toaster oven on the motel counter as gently as he could. It still made a loud thump and internal metal clangs. Sam pulled a face at it.

"Will you waterboard me? I want to know if it works."

"Sure. Why do you want to know?" Dean got the short white Wonder bread he'd smushed into his duffel.

Sam plugged it in. "We're gonna make all sorts of stuff with this! You can make your fancy restaurant things in a little oven. I just want to know if I'll actually go crazy and you'll have to untie me because it's too much."

"Don't get your hopes up until we test it," Dean warned, directing his stare pointedly at the oven. "I don't know how it's gonna work. First, we need a chair or something to tie you to." He passed the bread bag to Sam, who untied it and set to work with the timer knob. "Then, we need a dropper that's constantly dripping water onto your forehead. We'd need a machine or something for that."

The toaster was really working itself up, but the brothers were disappointed that nothing seemed to actually be happening.

"Isn't there supposed to be a light?" Sam asked.

"Just give it a sec."

Sam shrugged. "Just means we get Dean Cuisine later." He was hoping for a grilled cheese.

In Dean's stuff were Milky Ways from the motel front desk, a mini bag of pretzels, and a whole bunch of mulberries in a breathable drawstring bag from a girl. Dean was planning on melting the ingredients together after they ate peanut butter Slim Jim sandwiches. He hoped the fruit wasn't moldy.

"Maybe Dad will help."

"Dad could tell us if it works," Dean said. "Obviously it doesn't work on him, or else he'd have been dishonorably discharged. Dad was a good Marine."

Dean woke up in the middle of the rainfall not feeling hungry anymore. He leaned over for a drink and relished in it, drinking as much as was possible from the process. It was dark but he felt enhanced after the darkness behind his eyelids.

"It wasn't dying, you know," Tokyo-iel said. He became aware of her fingers drumming on his back like drops.

"What?" Dean asked.

"I mean, it was," the angel corrected herself. "But that wasn't the only way to live here."

Dean let her tap her fingers into him, wishing for more touch.

The angel took his shoulders and propped him up to sit. She squeezed his shoulder, the one that used to be bruised.

"I'll let you figure it out."

Dean was frozen, feeling the very real pressure of the hand on his shoulder. The rain pattered all over the barely-there canvass around him.

"Death gave me a planet with hallucinogenic water." Dean muttered and buried his head in his arms. The sky delivered barely tepid drizzles, but he felt calmer anyway. He stayed burrowed in his arms for drama's sake and noticed— he didn't notice Tokyo angel anywhere. He unburied himself and turned around to see Tokyo-iel rested her chin on her hand as well.

"Odoroki." She said, inflection somewhat muted. "Yūkei."

"I don't know Japanese," Dean said, already feeling a sick kind of déjà vu. "Uhh.. no, I really don't."

"That's the thing about hallucinogens, though, isn't it?" Tokyo pointed out. "If you exist about it hard enough, anything is right."

"That shit's sick." Dean didn't have the energy to get up. "It's just like heaven. I don't get a planet with weird laws of physics, I just get locked in a drug induced episode forever. I'm not a criminal!"

"You were never going to get out of dying forever," Tokyo-iel read through his soul like a pervert.

Dean hated her. "Yeah? Well, I always hoped there was a way to break out of the Matrix, so what!" He stormed up, picked up a rock, and lobbed it in Tokyo's direction. He missed.

"Dean," Castiel pleaded, one hand placating while the other gripped his angel blade. "I don't know who you think I am but it's me!"

"Holy fuck!" Dean growled. "New low!" He lunged and brought both fists around the angel blade and sliced neat ribbons into his palms. The pain erupted from his sensitive hands, blossoming into more anger.

Cas held the blade up and out of reach. "Hold on to me! I'm taking you home. Sam and I have been looking so long, Dean!" He stepped forward to grab Dean's arm.

Dean dodged and darted back. "Not to look like an asshole, but as soon as I go with you, it's got me." He shook his head, sending a liquid bead flying from a moist clump of his hair to the side. "There's no way you can prove yourself to me, Cas. You're me."

Cas made another pass at grabbing for Dean's arm. Dean lurched back. "Tell me how you found me."

"Sam died!" Cas yelled, hoarse. Dean felt his hand ball into a fist, squelching rivulets of blood.

"That's funny. Winchesters never die." A hole was forming in the pit of his stomach.

"He's alright!" Cas yelled. "He went to Death's library." Cas didn't make another attempt to grab Dean. The angel was already defeated.

"Yeah? Where's Death!" he demanded.

"Occupied with Sam. He knows we're here, Dean. He's giving us a chance."

Dean took another step back. "Tell me how long it's been."

"It's been..." Cas faltered, but it was because of some emotion choking his voice. "It's been a year and one hundred twenty-six days."

Dean didn't think it had been nearly that long, but he began to doubt himself. He’d been in the bowels and the daily rotation of the planet.

"Okay. Just one last thing," Dean said, anger fermenting. "Tell me something I don't know."

Castiel's hands were drooped. "Before I killed Naomi—" Dean rushed him. He weaseled his fingers and hand into the curve of Cas' grip, teasing the hilt of the blade apart from its master. Cas' grip tightened around Dean's holding the blade. Dean tried to swing it as a white glow emitted from their joined hands.

"Wha—" Dean uttered, perplexed at Cas' immobility. It was like shifting the hand of a hundred year old poised gargoyle.

"I have my powers back," Cas explained, and Dean thought he felt the familiar sensation of the ground leaving him in flight.

"Where— are we?" Castiel asked.

Dean stepped away, his naked torso brushing what was stiff and poking, a wing that could fill a room. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," Castiel growled. "I meant to fly us to Death's library, and— oh." He dropped to his knees and seized, wings disappearing.

"Cas!"

Cas stilled.

"What's wrong? Tell me what's wrong!" But clearly Cas was no longer conscious.

Dean knew exactly where he was. He could smell it, even if he'd never seen it without the help of vision as the only demon who'd ever made it this far underworld.

Dean felt Cas' body up for the blade, hoping it materialized, when Cas' body was yanked out from under him. He heard the weapon clatter to the ground.

Dean didn't have time to process when he heard Cas cry out in agony and a silencing crunch.

He didn't waste breath asking. He was human, but not for long. Dean found the blade and ran his finger along its length to sort the hilt from the sharp end. When he gripped it, he plunged it straight between his own fourth and fifth ribs, and grinned in pain through the sluggish spilling of his heart.

"You sons of bitches," Dean coughed up blood. It spilled hot liquid into his eyeballs and burned them. He pulled out the blade and slashed half heartedly across his throat. He felt woozy. Sleepy, emptying.

_I'm not afraid._ His vessel gentled, ragdoll. _A Winchester never dies._

The largest creature was a nonsensical rainbow light show of a beast, vapor and shadows, which used the tactic of a continuous, ungodly shriek to manipulate its way through corporeal form and motion. That's how Dean knew he was risen again, before he even opened his eyes, the disco in the sky was slipping through his shut eyelids. In an endless cycle of loss and rebirth, his eardrums were the first to leave, trailing a stream of their burst berry red juices down his earlobes.

He didn't know so much about light, but Dean could grab what was physical. And he was seeing crimson. He flicked his dark shades on to see better the ultraviolet of his realm. It smelled of burning metal and an underlying whiff incense— a potpourri of myrrh and morning dew. His skin prickled like the lightning was nearby and about to strike him now.

He grappled an incoming monster by the ridges in its exoskeleton, avoiding the braced claws which sprung out to punch something in a much farther place than its own body. The air vibration hit Dean anyway. Dean punched it uselessly back, hauling himself up to its bump sacs amid the blinding light show above which made him squint in pain. He was looking to head toward an eye.

He found dozens, in the agonizing light, twirling in some set synchronicity much higher than the ceiling seemed to allow. Calls for the hunt in the dialect of various, hungry creatures itching to kill each other sprang up around the unending shriek of the tall light creature. _Cas is down on the floor._

Dean dug his foot under the outer skeletal ridge it had been perched on and pried it off some, causing his beast to shriek. Another air punch tore through the colosseum and bruised him. He knelt down to the monster's exposed flesh which ran rancid with tiny black, living baubles that spit sticky substance into his hands as he probed his fingers into the creature's body, rooting for tendons to tear out. He dug and dug his revenge despite the baubles leeching at his hands, their acid melting hand flesh away into pulpy mess. From much, much higher above, large teeth and sheets of papery skin fell down the ground, sky things caught up in their own battle.

He pulled away and kicked more of the exoskeleton off of the body, the weaponized air vibrations pummeling Dean in return for each stomp he gave. As he further stomped the panel from it's fleshy insides, some attached guts pulled out alongside more black baubles, who pinpointed their attacker and poured up his bare legs in an angry swarm. 

Ignoring the acid things, crushing them under his quickly becoming black-stained teeth, Dean ascended, deaf by shrieking and nearly blind with the light, pushing off from his creature and fastening his hands to a floating glowing white eyeball.

His mouth gaped as it cleanly seared off the rest of his hands, and the eye blinked. He was sure it blinked. Dean fell from his mount and was snap, dragged away in the jaws of something with only one tooth on its upper and lower jaw each, skewering him like a large piece of kebab meat stuck in its spacious maw. _Maybe I'm an earring,_ he thought deliriously, as he was tilted helplessly sideways. _Can't die. Been here plenty of times. I'll kill them all eventually._

Cas didn't have time for eventually. Dean needed to stop dicking around. 

His new position was a perfect view of another skewer tooth creature scooping Cas up and tilting its head back, swallowing him whole. The exoskeleton beast chose that moment to punch at Dean's predator and connect.

Dean remembered something that he'd forgotten he learned. About the magic water. About making things real.

Dean's regenerated hand belonged to the First Blade. It's power coursed through his veins, glowing like embers, volcanic rivulets. Dean got tunnel vision. He ignored the surrounding mess of the underworld. The Blade streamlined his rage.

"Ahh," Dean readied himself. He burst into a cloud of smoke.

He killed his prey and slashed open Cas' tomb, hauling him out with his free hand, fighting not to stab Cas in the heart. Dean used the blade to scale the scaled beasts, and the little guys, and the demons. Demons streamed in, reaching for him, some he thought he recognized. He lit them up from the inside, digging the blade in deep and good so they choked while he watched the life die from their eyes, and jetted past them as black smoke after they perished, taunting, looking for the next kill.

They kept coming, hordes of them, humans too, as long as he wanted. He slashed and he killed. A dark curtain billowed from somewhere out there, beyond his line of vision. He was scratched and bitten and he bit back. Oh, he enjoyed biting. He bit down hard, and tore like a vicious wild animal, grinning as distress crossed over their faces. The more he afflicted the more they fought him, giving him everything he craved. He ripped them into skin suits and meat pieces.

The visage of Death wafted through the turmoil, dispensing a lifted eyebrow. Dean slashed at smoke.

Actually, the grounds were getting quite saturated with a fine mist, difficult to see through. The dark curtain descended again, thumping, sweeping Dean airborne at contact, cutting his crumpled body through an incredible distance and far out of the misting cloud.

He landed in a terrible stupor.

Dean was thrown enough away to finally see the full form of the dazzling discotheque creature, if he craned his head. It was as tall as the Chrysler skyscraper in New York.

The dozens of glowing white eyes did twirl in synchronicity, following orbital rings all around its mass. At its head were four heads.

The pale ram bowed its head as if to charge, beautiful, perfect horns curving in soft white marble, almost a luminescent blue.

The eagle had its head facing its neighbor, eyeing Dean with an avian glare, soft feathers caressing it's circular eye and pillowing the hill of its cheek.

The lion head was in a perpetual snarl, it's teeth flashing in and out behind its dark lips as it let out a guttural sound that Dean couldn't hear or feel. But it was there, proof as the eye can see. 

The zebra was nickering, terrifying in a way only horses get Dean. Like a terrible Mt. Rushmore, an orbiting shelf of blank human-faced masks was making its way to pass in front of the heads. Dean saw its gassy eyes alight in burning fire before it disappeared behind the rotating mask.

Below the necks was a behemoth rib cage encasing the rainbow light show, the body of the creature made with the multicolors of God's universe. Draped over it were trailing skin-like cloth sheets which cascaded nearly to the length of the floor, where it transformed into a distant rainstorm— misty vapor flowing to kiss the ground in tendrils and billowing cloud.

Dean thought he counted six dark shifting wings. Their bulk created shadows.

"Hell of a trip," Dean grumbled, low.

The vapor had settled over Castiel's vessel. In a moment, the entire being turned sharply into a blue pillar of grace and flew home to the form he belonged in. Dean’s skin stopped feeling the sense of imminent lightning.

Dean ran the length it took to reach him, dangerous, on the hunt. Part of the way through allowed hope to emerge from his loaded psyche.

Dean slowed to a stop in front of his friend. He knelt down. Cas' eyes darted back and forth between Dean's two bloodshot green ones. "Dean, are you okay?"

"Am I okay? Think about yourself for once," Dean chided, relieved beyond measure. "I'm so damn..." he trailed off.

"Damned," Castiel murmured, nose an inch away from Dean's. "I came to receive your soul, Dean. You have it, it's just..."

He was doing that thing where the tears brimmed in his eyes but never fell. "You're still. You." Cas reached out to brush the back of his fingers against Dean's face.

Dean grabbed his hand. "Don't." He transformed into smoke and swirled restlessly in front of Cas, then became Dean Winchester again.

"Couldn't do that before."

Cas tilted his head up in wary observation. "Maybe it's because you wanted to be able to."

Dean was uncomfortable.

"We're here because you wanted to be here, Dean." Dean couldn't look Cas in the eye. 

"These monsters are here because you drank the liquid, and you created them so that you'd have something to kill and something that fought back. You didn't want it easy." Castiel shook his head, believing it himself, even though it wasn't true. "You wanted to get hurt, and you wanted to be raked as nothing but cartilage and raw nervous system across the coals and so you made it real."

He _had_ drank the liquid right after he was struck by lightning...

_It's a tool to create._

And then he'd found Purgatory.

Dean whispered throatily, "No. Death made a mistake. These monsters have always..."

They lapsed into silence.

"I'm a demon. You fixed me once. Can you do that again?"

"No."

A tear fell from Dean's eye to drown itself in the thick fabric of Cas' reliable trench coat. He wiped his hand over his face and cleared his throat.

"How'd you hold angel swords and fight heavenly battles with no arms?" He said.

Castiel frowned. "We have arms. You didn't see them."

Dean laughed and positioned himself to sit next to him. He put his arm around Cas and tugged him close, leaning Cas' head against him. "Look," Dean's eyes drifted a distance. "I'm sorry we don't do this anymore. I'm— I'm sorry life got in the way." He took a labored breath. "I'm sorry for dragging you into my fight."

"Can we go home now?" Castiel said quietly.

"Yeah. We can do that."

Dean welcomed the familiar sensation of the ground dropping out from under him.


	5. Chapter 5, Miss Autonomy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fast healing skin these days is a natural concealer. Bela would never need her SPF30 again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains gore. Skip any time to the final ~10 paragraphs counted up from the bottom to avoid unsettling imagery and possible triggers for noncon and instead get emergency kittens.
> 
> I have a playlist on Spotify titled Congratulations, You Are A Pioneer!
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/user/22i5ztu6kvixjxpkoubvos2ka/playlist/5RxgQ5ygZfTQ5EHUpqFvvr?si=ktOAZqWxS1yrZs2bZuQ1CQ

“Sure thing. Uh-huh. No, I understand. Yes, most definitely, I see your point, not to claim just anybody is more of a Goddess, but now that I think of it... great." Bela nodded along, hoping for the inane topic to be over with.

Bela didn’t know anything about Goddesses, and technically her manufacturer knew more than her, but Bela knew that this deep versed scrutiny was about studying beings more powerful than she who had their own opinions, never mind what new observations Josephine made. But hey. Not a science, Bela told herself, backing off in surrender.

The reason Bela accepted that this one-sided conversation was mostly gibberish was that Josephine made her main income from Bela by crafting some really beautiful forgeries. When she thought of Josephine she thought fake, or supplier of fake goods, she couldn’t help it. Despite Josephine, spiritual lapidarist, once traveling the globe and curating items from Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, India, Bali, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Austria, and the Highlands, she had become excellent at discerning what made an object unique and used that to her advantage to replicate it in her studio workshops.

So maybe observing had gotten her so far. The woman’s business was entirely a ruse, built over the years as a retired mystical items dealer who knew how to manufacture what she wanted within the state. What was once legitimate streamlined into a creative’s wet dream. She dangled scarcity in the faces of buyers, but the slow turn-out was from taking the time to perfect each individual piece. A testament of her eye for small detail, she and her husband raised their own hemp and silkworms.

Bela considered Josephine her favorite artist in the world. Her accredited triumphs were featured in private collections in countries the artifacts supposedly originated in, and Bela would gladly be quoted saying that Josephine could fake man’s first landing on Mars until you asked him to prove he had real skin.

"Alright. Just one more thing.” Bela said after Josephine finished talking about her promotion of some figure into the echelons of Goddesses. “Listen. This isn’t peanuts, I’ll pay whatever it takes.”

“What’s that?” Josephine asked, intrigued by the mention of large transfers of money. Whatever Bela wanted was the jackpot, mother of all genuine artifacts.

The conversation lasted for another twelve minutes while Bela’s associate promised to keep an ear to the ground.

A genuine irreplaceable object, Josephine thought to herself when she hit end call. The only one in the world.

She couldn’t deliver on it. Ms. Talbot will rest in her grave without having come close, she decided. A cat! An intersex Siamese cat. Who knew cats could be intersexed?

Bela took her disposable flip phone and snapped it in halves. 

"Satisfying," she said out loud. "Really getting somewhere, Bela." She tossed the ruined stim tech into a wastebasket.

She readied herself in the next forty minutes, a preferred understated necklace which drew attention to her covered clavicle, and a high neck top to showcase her thinness.

An unusual habit had been taken up of never removing a ring on her finger, except to clean. It was a fake diamond piece she owned, studded with rock all along the band and with a large prehnite center gilded in silver, propped up rather dimensionally. The ring was downright gaudy.

She neglected a jacket. Bela often selected her jacket by checking the contents of their pockets as they hung in her closet, and then usually slid her favorite off the armless mannequin it always rested on anyway.

A pristine blue eye contact on the left and a blue toned hazel on the right. The rule in a mismatching set: the bluer or lighter always on the left.

She then dabbed on a little wrist/neck parfum that she picked up from a locally sourced enchantress, which didn't scent as anything at all. Bela would be a terrible thief if she let her pheromones trail everywhere she went.

If it weren’t for the fact that Bela was the only tenant on her floor due to some pipes and wiring going on the _fritz_ at random intervals, Bela’s neighbors would notice she was a natural honey blonde. Also that she sported several other colors, hair styles, and lengths, some quite tomboyish. Today her blonde had a few tight curls framing her face. Never mind under the wig. Under _that_ was the true brown.

She was pleased to have such a near match. The body.

It made restarting after— So much easier.

Her face was very familiar to the face she used to have, but the closest she could find was a little bit older— or several decades younger, but regarding Hell, who's counting— and appropriate for what her age should be by now, she thought. She actually liked being at the bright new beginning of her thirties. It was the more beautiful and wise age.

Bela Talbot had been only twenty-six when she died.

She handled her own financial and crime empire splendidly, budgeting between scheduling personal flights for breaking into lock-ups and sleuthing out cursed objects, which were in demand. Honestly, the postal service was her go-to for strictly business. Her lifestyle was made to work around her meditation on life. To maintain her frivolity required money, which required planner apps, plus a lot of phone calls, some to the other side. She was getting her life as an unfrequented mogul back— something most demons had never had the tenacity to make of themselves when they were human.

She also had a nifty itty hobby on the side as a crossroads demon.

The demon entered the elevator and gave her reflection one last glance. No use dwelling over, she left the building in a minute and a half. She spent some amount of time impersonating handymen, other employees, relatives, immigrants, a heiress, even the homeless— a surprising ruse to get many places, and those costumes required flexibility. Bela flicked her eyes to their red tint and grinned at the blue and hazel contacts still adorning them.

The lift went down.

Bela unlocked her phone to recheck the planner. Seeing last night's failure entered in yesterday’s log reminded her that the spell book would remain in the wind for another couple of weeks.

That was alright.

Bela's first stop was the animal shelter. Past the entry bulletin board with photos of lost pets and pleas for their safe return, the smell of fur greeted her. She'd put in all of her hours to become a shelter volunteer. It had opened up the way to an additional two hours of her time every week.

"Oh, Holly!" The employee named Rose gushed. "It's terrible, but they're cute. You'll like this."

Bela crossed behind the reception counter and stashed her bag below the computer desk. "You see a thousand kittens and puppies in a year, no exaggeration. How can you still be excited?"

"You know me. It's the only way to survive the exhaustion and heartbreak," Rose said cheerily, signing Bela in on a clipboard as Bela washed her hands in the employee washroom.

The demon returned and led Rose to the neonatal cat room. Bela told her, "And seeing as this is New York, that's saying something." Rose went ahead to get the door for her, to keep her hands sterile. Once inside Rose squirted her own hands with dry soap from the automatic dispenser.

"I'm excited for you, Holly. Let me be hype for you! Nobody's met them yet."

Bela approached the two sleepy kittens, tilting her head.

"They've been weighed this morning. Reached past twelve point four grams, all of them." Rose said quietly. "In an hour there's another feeding scheduled, look." She pointed at the printed paper on cork to the left.

Bela knelt down to examine the little felines, with large ears and a bit of the inside of one's pink tongue showing. It blinked to reveal the signature kitten-blue eyes. She wondered how much it could see from it's sleeping area. They ordinarily seemed so blind. Bela poked its protruding claws with a finger. The cat stood up shakily but confident in its coordination, and faced her head on.

"Where did you get these?" She asked.

"Why did you have to ask?" Rose groaned, genuinely pained. "Their mother was mutilated. A police officer brought them in, said she found them at a scene."

"A scene? A crime scene?"

"I doubt that. Don't you think she could have just been at a domestic? Or patrolling Marble Cemetery."

"That makes sense." Bela watched the kittens rouse and become alert. They were very cute. Both were golden tabbies with dark spots and tear stain patterns under each eye, and two I I markings above the eyes rather than M. "How old?"

"Three weeks."

"And they're just tabbies."

"What else would they be?"

"Nothing, I was just asking."

"Okay," Rose said, checking out the clock face on the wall. "I need to go pick up my kid from a sleepover. Dahl's with a potential adoptee family in the cat room, if you need anything." She left.

Bela pulled out her Huawei phone and snapped pictures of the kittens, then sent them to two of her most recent contacts. Within the hour she was in a text conversation with Valerie Culver, cat breeder and exotic enthusiast.

[ⓋⒸ Where did you get these? I won’t buy unless I know their lineage

ⒷⓉ Won’t sell to you. Plenty of buyers out there.

ⓋⒸ I’m not kidding. People need to know their lineage for breeding purposes.

ⒷⓉ I’m losing legitimacy if don’t know if they’re F1 or F5, aren’t I?

ⓋⒸ ...

ⓋⒸ Unless you’re keeping them, they should be with me

ⓋⒸ ...

ⓋⒸ Bela. You could keep one. Not both

ⒷⓉ Just wanted confirmation. Thanks.]

Bela cut her short when Culver tried to call. The kittens were more valuable in New York, where they were illegal.

She washed her hand in soap and picked one of the feisty boys up, stretching him out. It had an adorable stiff tail which pointed downward. He looked like a regular little kitten, if she hadn't been involved with fanciers herself, she wouldn't have had a suspicion. Its eyes did seem intelligent, though. And the kittens were very mobile. Like any kittens.

Bela fed them and walked straight out the front door to the animal shelter with them, not bothering to hide from the camera.

She returned later having gone straight to the home of a child, apparently?, since he was the only one home, in response to the online advert from sellers. Bela only took the opportunity that New York had so abundantly offered. The pet ad on the site was listed among the adverts of five other people selling underage animals who had no idea how cats work.

The kittens she brought back to the neonatal room were two tabbies with W's printed on their foreheads.

Bela set her thermostat at 75° and checked to make sure the kittens hadn't become too cold on the journey. She had stored away litter expectantly, meant for a separate purpose.

They would be okay for now. Bela told her phone to alert her in four hours, and removed her wig to free the brown.

She ate a chicken salad as she listened very hard for a scheduled summoning. It was from another crossroads demon in Australia.

Maybe she was a bad person, targeting souls. Who cares? The men called on her at the crossroads, not the other way around. During deals with men she wore a black cocktail dress, industry standard, and grabbed the men by their heads to force them at her mouth before they could change their mind.

They wanted the stupidest shit. It was all stupid. Money, talent, health. None of it mattered because they were all willing to endure eternal damnation. They were too stupid to realize they should be fearing for their fucking lives, because their deaths will be a tormented nightmare until the lights of Hell goes out and the whole shitty world goes kablooey by whatever bests God.

Bela didn't make friends, exactly. She had contacts. Her contact had made a lot of deals in one area in Australia ten years ago, and was scouting for one of them to commence. She was waiting for the other demon to patch her through at the beginning of an unfortunate bastard going off the shits and cowering at shadows.

Bela answered the summoning by appearing next to the crossroads demon. Her jacket was on her shoulders.

"Nice suit," she said. There was a crash and a keening sound from the room next door.

"I have you to thank for this," the demon said, delighted.

"You can go now," Bela told them. She didn't bother to go into the room the vic was hiding in, presumably his bedroom, where he was talking frantically to himself. She could hear the howls, too. A small part of her wondered why she wasn't cowering as well. But she had been forged in Hell, and she was of the same, waiting here to catch first glimpse of the dog.

The hellhound burst through the room and Bela whistled a long, high note, trying to gain its attention. She heard it growl in the bedroom and she stalked it purposefully inside.

"Hey! Balto!" Bela demanded as she javelin-tossed her angel weapon into the hide of the great coarse dog. Its bristled fur gave off a permanent singed waft, which was as unpleasant as the sound of the angel weapon hitting its target as it penetrated with a horrible wet thunk. 

"Come here. _Now_." To her surprise, it relinquished its mission and limped toward her, growling all the while.

"Bad boy," she criticized, jaw taut. She yanked the handle of her blade back. The hellhound made a ferocious snarl, guttural sounds dropping and rolling trailing its outburst. Bela figured it was about two seconds away from snapping and murdering her and the vic.

"Hey," she switched demeanor to a gentle tone, kneeling down. "It's okay." The hurt and distrusting guttural growl revved up into a small snarl again, letting its guard down not for a second. Bela held the blade in her right hand, examining it.

Black blood. She plunged the angel blade up through the soft flesh under the hellhound's jaw into its brain just as it made mind to make an aborted motion toward her throat.

"Who are you?"

Bela refused to glance at the vic. She hadn't done shit for Shit For Brains. Hellhounds will be roaming all over the area tonight, and one of them was bound to finish the job and drag him to Hell. The hounds were trained well.

“Kah-nuh-ahm-dahr,” she said instead, reading from a paper that she retrieved from her jacket pocket. She stuck it back in for safe keeping and went to find the kitchen.

"Don't," she threatened with her back turned away from him, "Follow me." The sounds of the vic behind her stalled.

Unwashed dishes sat in the sink. Bela grabbed a cup to bring with her to the bathroom, and reentered the bedroom to grab the devil dog.

“You can’t just—“ the man started. He froze when he saw Bela, and his eye seemed to spasm as he gave a weird, huffing gasp. Oh, so the tripping guy’d seen her true face then. He was already Hell’s property, just a corpse in the clutches of a constricting snake, no more free than if he were already in Hell. It was inevitable.

“This is no illusion,” Bela bothered to half-ass pointer finger a quick circle around the the chin of her pretty face before dragging the hound to the tub. It was heavier and ganglier than she would have liked, but she wasn’t trying to win cool points. She stripped completely naked, stood in the tub and hauled it in after herself, then, trying to picture how to bathe in it now that she was in the situation, grimaced and got her back and shoulders down as flat to the bottom of the tub as possible. Her knees were bent and blockading her from a truly massive creature that was emitting a brimstone scent which Bela could do without. She let out a breath and grabbed the grisly fur to get it a little more on top of her, thinking,

"I hope it was worth it," Bela told nobody, loudly to be heard from the other room. "It's a long way down, your soul dragged by one of these things. You think you die and wake up chained and suspended? Your soul has to get there in the jaws of pain itself.” She took back her angel weapon and bled the beast into the sink cup.

“They get hungry, you know.” Bela poured blood on her head and rubbed it into her cheeks. A wet charcoal facial. Smelled like an empty grill gone wrong. “The hounds eat you for sustenance on the way further down. Have you ever traveled up a mountain, and felt sick from how thin the air is? It's like that, but acrid, and instead of getting tired, you feel how sharp everything is. All of your senses are wide awake.

"Kah-nuh-ahm-dahr.”

Angry tears welled in her eyes, and she let them loose. No one was watching, and besides, she didn’t want to get blood in her eye running them away. She couldn’t seem to get more air into her lungs. As her organs restricted, she thought she would run out of air to speak with. Oh, she was having some sort of— episode. She hadn’t had to think about Hell, really think about it, for a while.

When Bela spoke again it was trembling without ambition, starting to get a desperation to her sound. But she still projected her shaky voice out to nobody, so they could hear, because they needed to know what a fuck-up they were.

“That's not the half of it,” she faltered. More tears arrived, and she added with the little pocket of air still left in her lungs, “Pain is _exhausting_.” Her lungs were clamped shut.

Bela carved some sigils she knew into the dog, cut carefully across and through them to make sure they were dead links. And she bathed, in a state of blank. Finally she had her lungs. There was a crashing as the vic in the kitchen started yelling, frightened, and threw all of his ceramics and pots across the room. He was extremely loud.

“Shut the fuck up, you demon bitch!” The man screamed, finally acknowledging her. “Get the hell out of my house!”

“It’s in your head, not your house,” Bela said, irked. “Pain permeates ever fiber of your being and every cell in your mind, and you can never escape the exhaustion,” she said. “It wears at you. It can't be ignored, how you feel when you are splintered off, piece by piece, every hour of every day. You think you'd get used to it. But the hounds have to eat. You're just a dirty rotten core without a body. Who knew you could feel so much without a meatsuit trapping all of those feelings in? You've been borrowing that skin. We all have.

“In Hell your torturers arrive as the exact people you expect.” She held her hands into the fur where the knife’s generous wounds seeped, pressing blood into her hands, slathering it on already bloodied skin. “If you were evil enough in life, you know who. Their faces. Their voices. The words they have always used and ones that were never said out loud.” There was a shutting of the man’s front door as he booked it to his car, attempting to outdrive his terrors. “He didn’t have to say any words. I always felt— I knew."

Her father had invaded her, slipped his razor blade laden hand inside and carried it up, splitting her insides open so that her soft stomach oozed out of the rift as he ripped up, up, like she had a zipper holding two haves of Bela together and the end of the track was in her forehead. She tried to scream but there was too much pain to bear, and her vocal chords were sliced at the razors' ascent up her trachea, between her eyes, carving up the outside of her skull like a knife meeting and circumventing the hard stone pit of a fruit. The razored digits scored the slightest lines of laceration against her skull bone, scraping up, then down, a bloody mimicry of what could be a gentle head scratch received from a loved one through their young child’s hair. They peeled the thin flaps of scalp completely away, leaving nothing but a stained skeleton.

The razors nicked the outer surface of her skull as if testing to find a soft spot in the wall. As if maybe eventually, after months, the digits could grind a pile of fine, powdery dust from the entire bone, soft shavings floating down like sand through an hourglass, all starting with five barely there scratches.

Or like the weak wall of the skull could be knocked in to reveal a grey, extinct brain floating in a well of cranial fluid behind jagged, splinter-thin white fragments. Her brain. A snow globe that had been smashed for its centerpiece that was a long passed animal.

Bela had had her parents murdered and still, in the end, suffered at the hands of them. She had lost.

But miracles happen.

Elsewhere, far away beyond her capability to imagine good things in the world, people were humming nonsense tunes over a tasty serving of food, and laughing hard over their own jokes, and giving charity to each other just to make friends and strangers' hearts pump with joy.

Angels were trying to get their own digs and end the topworld. As they lay siege to Hell looking for their righteous man, a was-woman found that they had left an aperture in the door open to the first life.

A life with sunflowers.

And earthworms.

The taste of garden variety strawberries, bright and small as buttons.

Bela loved the level surface of a car steering wheel gliding beneath her hands. She loved the artificial wind from the air conditioner, the soft pop hits of the radio station, the sound of items shifting in her car trunk. 

She loved breeze itself, short-lived currents that fly invisible through a realm humans can’t see.

The moody crowds, the numerous window reflections, uneven cement cracks in the sidewalk, the ugly cigarettes that proved someone has been here. 

She did _not_ have to walk on her knees for a hundred miles repenting. Mary Oliver.

The Savannah kittens were doing alright by themselves, wandering the flat by the time their catnapper returned smelling like Dial 3-in-1 and wearing a stranger’s clothes.

Bela scooped the cats up in a cotton bath towel made with soft, zero-twist yarn wrapped around a microwaved rice sock to keep their temperatures and buried her nose in their warm baby frames. She felt clean, double-showered in tea tree and rose water, at peace with these little wildcats.

Barefooted, Bela slid open the glass door to the apartment deck and carried them with her to the swinging wicker chair. She settled into the overstuffed padding. The sky was blue above the sidewalk maples and the sun smiled down somewhere up at the peak of the world, beyond the buildings.

She was suddenly soaring in her newly rising sense of freedom at her most recent accomplishment. Her act hadn’t calmed her, it startled her heart, it didn’t know how to settle. She was in the exciting pursuit now.

She used her toe to push off and sway the chair gently back and forth, and curled her legs cross-legged as it rocked her and the babies. One of the cats mewed, unaware of the thrill inside Bela. They were getting their claws stuck in everything. Bela took their paws and picked them out of her towels.

“I feel blackberry claws, thorns like you two. They’re really saying ‘I love you’. I hear kittens cry. I watch them grow. They’ll sleep much more than I’ll ever know...” her voice drifted, far more melodious than some people thought her capable of.

She rocked with them.

“Why are there so many songs about rainbows? And what’s on the other side? Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide... someday, we’ll find it. The rainbow connection. The felines, the dreamers, and me...”

“We're just denizens on this earth," Bela told the cats. “A tall ball of gas above us that keeps us all here so that we can make ourselves. Natural science. Better than God or the Devil himself.

“We can do whatever we wish with that life. I’m Bela. I’m a thief. I’m dead but I pretend I’m alive, and it works out pretty well, being free.” She tapped her finger under its chin to make a baby perk its face up and gave the kitten a boop on the nose. “Life is worth everything.”

The kittens' ears swung around, detecting.

She kissed their speckled heads. “You know, somewhere out there is _my_ cat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you got through this, I’m relieved. The whole time I was writing wasn’t really clicking for me as “this is Bela’s voice” but I knew I had to reintroduce this character. She’s quite a bit lonely right now, isn’t she? A chapter of one can get boring but I’d like to thank anyone who got through. Let me know if you think there should be any additional warnings for possible triggers or easily squicked out readers. I myself wrote this in my car parked at a grassy knoll in the sun, smelling poetry books about birds and thinking about tattoos. Treat yourself right and go outside, friends.


End file.
